XDP-Accelerated Packet Processing on SCION Endhosts

SCION is a next-generation network architecture promising many benefits over the current Internet like path-awareness and built-in trust. Especially SCION’s native multi-path properties provide new potentials for extreme performance networking applications. However, the performance of SCION’s reference implementation is currently limited as two of its central elements, the SCION dispatcher as well as the packet processing in the client library, have a low processing throughput, leading to packet loss under high loads. In order to fully unlock SCION’s potentials at ultra-high peak data rates, we propose two optimizations: The SCION Dispatcher bypass through the use of XDP and an optimized SCION connection implementation for efficient packet processing. We show that our dispatcher bypass is theoretically able to approximately quadruple the bandwidth, while in a real-world scenario the throughput increases by factor of 3. Additionally, in conjunction with the optimized SCION connection, throughput can theoretically be increased sevenfold, while a threefold increase was observed in the real-world scenario.