In-Network Key-Value Cache with Linearizability

Recently, In-Network Cache (INC) systems have been proposed to promote the performance of remote storage systems. INC offloads cache onto programmable switches between the clients and the servers, responding to clients’ data queries within a sub-RTT time. However, most existing INC solutions do not take applications’ linearizability requirement into consideration, which could lead to query errors and storage state errors in the runtime. We propose a new INC system — NetKV-L, which preserves the high-performance I/O without compromising the linearizability. NetKV-L devises a sequentiality enforcement mechanism, a PSN correction mechanism, and a response memorization mechanism to guarantee linearizability under possible unreliable network conditions. Our prototype and experiments show that NetKV-L could achieve almost the same performance as the state-of-the-art systems while additionally guaranteeing linearizability.