Low-Overhead User Space Dataplane Acceleration

We investigate the hardware/software co-design of a TCP-compatible protocol and network stack that can be hardware-accelerated by programmable NICs. In particular, we are interested in NICs based on the reconfigurable match table (RMT) programming model. Our goal is to offer all the same features of TCP, but design the protocol such that accelerated packet processing using minimal per-connection state on the NIC is possible. We require a kernel-bypass infrastructure and use Netronome's DPDK support to realize it. On top of this infrastructure, the software portion of this network stack executes at user-level unhindered by kernel-level packet processing overheads.