RVNet: a Fast and High Energy Efficiency Network Packet Processing System on RISC-V

RISC-V is a new open-source general-purpose instruction set architecture (ISA) developed by the University of California, Berkeley. It allows everyone to design their hardware circuits based on application characteristics and can be used in embedded devices, desktop computer and high-performance servers. In this paper, we use the RISC-V processor to design a fast network packet processing system. It aims to use less power and lower price to provide a faster network data processing capability for upper-layer applications in SDN and NFV. According to the results in our prototype on Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA), our system has a comparable performance with DPDK, one of the fastest packet processing frameworks on the x86 platform. It is worth mentioning that our system has higher (about 7.75 times) network packets processing energy efficiency than DPDK.