Custom UDP-Based Transport Protocol Implementation over DPDK

Abstract

As industry of information technologies evolves, demand for high speed data transmission steadily increases. The need in it can be found in variety of different industries – from entertainment (trend for increasing resolution of video-cast for example) to scientific research. However, there are several problems that hinder network application capabilities. One of them is slow packet processing due to significant overheads on system calls for simple network operations. There are hardware solutions, but from the economical point of view, using legacy equimpent is preferable due to high cost of updating network infrastructure. Thus, software solutions to these problems can be preferable. One of them is DPDK toolset which gives the ability to tailor network operations to the application. RMDT is a custom transport protocol aimed at high speed data transmission over lossy networks with high latency. The protocol is built over standard Linux UDP sockets. Thus it is heavily reliant on the networking stack performance. The goal of this work is to improve RMDT performance by means of DPDK in a 10G network and to assess the benefits of such an implementation.