The advent of Software Defined Networking (SDN) and Network Function Virtualization (NFV) has revolutionized the deployment of software-based routing and forwarding devices in cloud and network systems. Yet, the performance of IPv6 route lookup in these devices remains a significant challenge due to two main factors: 1) the longer IPv6 addresses, which hinder high-speed lookup, and 2) the huge IPv6 IP address space, necessitates adaptability to varied length-based prefix distributions across various network scenarios. Existing IP lookup algorithms fall short in addressing these IPv6-specific challenges. To address these challenges, this paper proposes a novel Heuristic Binary Search (HBS) scheme. Building on the classical “Binary Search on Prefix Lengths” scheme, HBS employs three innovative techniques to achieve adaptive and fast IPv6 lookups with incremental updates: 1) a heuristic binary search method for fast lookup; 2) a tree rotation method for dynamic adjustment of binary search tree shapes in response to changes in prefix distribution; and 3) the introduction of the Associated Marker List (AML), a new data structure aimed at facilitating rapid incremental prefix updates. Our theoretical proofs and comprehensive evaluations demonstrate HBS’s superiority in lookup performance, dynamic adaptability, update speed, and memory efficiency.

Layer-3 load balancing is a key topic in the networking field. It is well acknowledged that flowlet is the most promising solution because of its good trade-off between load balance and packet reordering. However we find its one significant limitation: it makes the forwarding paths of flows unpredictable. To address this limitation this paper presents BurstBalancer a simple yet efficient load balancing system with a sketch named BalanceSketch. Our design philosophy isdoing less changesto keep the forwarding path of most flows fixed which guides the design of BalanceSketch and our balance operations. We have fully implemented BurstBalancer in a small-scale testbed built with Tofino switches and conducted both large-scale event-level (NS-2) and ESL (electronic system level) simulations. Our results show that BurstBalancer achieves 5%$\sim$35% smaller FCT than LetFlow in symmetric topology and up to 30× smaller FCT in asymmetric topology while 58× fewer flows suffer from path changing. All related codes are open-sourced at GitHub

The advent of Software Defined Networking (SDN) and Network Function Virtualization (NFV) has revolutionized the deployment of software-based routing and forwarding devices in modern network architectures. However, IPv6 route lookup remains a substantial performance bottleneck in these software-based devices due to two key challenges: (1) the longer addresses and prefixes, which hinder high-speed IPv6 lookup, and (2) the larger address space of IPv6 necessitates adaptability to varied length-based prefix distributions across various network scenarios. Current trie-based methods like SAIL and Poptrie have enhanced IPv4 lookup, but they struggle with adaptive and fast IPv6 lookup due to their fixed search scheme from short to long prefixes. To overcome these challenges, we propose a novel Heuristic Binary Search (HBS) scheme to achieve adaptive and fast IPv6 lookup. HBS refines the traditional "Binary Search on Prefix Lengths" scheme by incorporating two key techniques: (1) a heuristic binary search method for accelerated lookup and (2) a tree rotation method for dynamic adjustment of binary search tree shapes in response to changes in prefix distribution. Our evaluation of HBS demonstrates its superiority in terms of lookup throughput, update speed, memory efficiency, and dynamic adaptability.

Layer-3 load balancing is a key topic in the networking field. It is well acknowledged that flowlet is the most promising solution because of its good trade-off between load balance and packet reordering. However, we find its one significant limitation: it makes the forwarding paths of flows unpredictable. To address this limitation, this paper presents BurstBalancer, a simple yet efficient load balancing system with a sketch, named BalanceSketch. Our design philosophy is doing less changes to keep the forwarding path of most flows fixed, which guides the design of BalanceSketch and balance operations. We have fully implemented BurstBalancer in a small-scale testbed built with Tofino switches, and conducted large-scale NS-2 simulations. Our results show that BurstBalancer achieves 5%∼35% smaller FCT than LetFlow in symmetric topology and up to 30× smaller FCT in asymmetric topology, while 58× fewer flows suffer from path changing. All related codes are open-sourced at Github22https://github.com/BurstBalancer/Burst-Balancer.