Scalable, High Performance Ethernet Forwarding with CUCKOOSWITCH

Several emerging network trends and new architectural ideas are placing increasing demand on forwarding table sizes. From massive-scale datacenter networks running millions of virtual machines to flow-based software-defined networking, many intriguing design options require FIBs that can scale well beyond the thousands or tens of thousands possible using today's commodity switching chips. This paper presents CUCKOOSWITCH, a software-based Ethernet switch design built around a memory-efficient, high-performance, and highly-concurrent hash table for compact and fast FIB lookup. We show that CUCKOOSWITCH can process 92.22 million minimum-sized packets per second on a commodity server equipped with eight 10 Gbps Ethernet interfaces while maintaining a forwarding table of one billion forwarding entries. This rate is the maximum packets per second achievable across the underlying hardware's PCI buses.