Reframer

Reframer is a FastClick based Network Function (NF) that leverages the idea of briefly buffering, delaying, and reordering the (possibly paced) incoming packets to increase spatial locality for network traffic. In a nutshell, Reframer consists of 3 components: (i) a classifier that arranges input packets to a flow table, (ii) a scheduler that flushes flows from the table after a given buffering time or upon achieving a given burst-size, and (iii) a compressor that coalesces packets to eliminate redundancy.

Reframer is developed on FastClick, but it could be adapted to other packet processing frameworks!

For more information check out our paper at NSDI '22.

Download

git clone --recursive https://github.com/hamidgh09/Reframer.git

Repository Organization

This repository contains information, experiment setups, and some of the results presented in our NSDI'22 paper. More specifically:

• experiments/motivation contains Fastclick and NPF configuration files to run experiments that are disucssed in the section 2 of our paper.
• experiments/Reframer contains Fastclick and NPF configuration files for evaluating the impact of Reframer on a given trace file when packets path through a given chain of NFs. Read this file for more information about running experiments that are disucessed in the section 4 of our paper.
• results/ contains all graphs that we have used in the paper along with gnuplot configuration files that generate graphs from given csv files.

Testbed

NOTE: Before running the experiments, you need to prepare your testbed according to the following guidelines.

All the experiments mainly require Fastclick, NPF, and Linux perf tool. There is a simple bash script (setup_repo.sh) that could help you to clone/compile different repositories, but you should mainly rely on this README.md.

Network Performance Framework (NPF) Tool

You can install NPF via the following command:

python3 -m pip install --user npf

Do not forget to add export PATH=$PATH:~/.local/bin to ~/.bashrc or ~/.zshrc. Otherwise, you cannot run npf-compare and npf-run commands.

NPF will look for cluster/ and repo/ in your current working/testie directory. We have included the required repo for our experiments and a sample cluster template, available at experiment/. For more information about how to setup your cluster please check the NPF guidelines.

NPF automatically clone and build FastClick for the experiments based on the testie/npf files.

Data Plane Development Kit (DPDK)

We use DPDK to bypass kernel network stack in order to achieve line rate in our tests. To build DPDK, you can run the following commands:

git clone https://github.com/DPDK/dpdk.git
cd dpdk
git checkout v20.02
make install T=x86_64-native-linux-gcc

In case you want to use a newer (or different) version of DPDK, please check DPDK documentation.

After building DPDK, you have to define RTE_SDK and RTE_TARGET by running the following commands:

export RTE_SDK=<your DPDK root directory>
export RTE_TARGET=x86_64-native-linux-gcc

Also, do not forget to setup hugepages. To do so, you can modify GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX variable in /etc/default/grub file similar to the following configuration:

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="isolcpus=0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9 iommu=pt intel_iommu=on default_hugepagesz=1G hugepagesz=1G hugepages=32 acpi=on selinux=0 audit=0 nosoftlockup processor.max_cstate=1 intel_idle.max_cstate=0 intel_pstate=on nopti nospec_store_bypass_disable nospectre_v2 nospectre_v1 nospec l1tf=off netcfg/do_not_use_netplan=true mitigations=off"

Citing our paper

If you use Reframer, please cite our paper:

@inproceedings {OM,
title = {Packet Order Matters! Improving Application Performance by Deliberately Delaying Packets},
author = {Ghasemirahni, Hamid and Barbette, Tom and Katsikas, Georgios P. and Farshin, Alireza and Roozbeh, Amir and Girondi, Massimo and Chiesa, Marco and {Maguire Jr.}, Gerald Q. and Kosti\'{c}, Dejan},
booktitle = {19th {USENIX} Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation ({NSDI} 22)},
year = {2022},
address = {Renton, WA},
url = {https://www.usenix.org/conference/nsdi22/presentation/ghasemirahni},
publisher = {{USENIX} Association},
month = apr,
}

Help

If you have any question regarding the code or the paper you can contact me (hamidgr [at] k t h [dot] s e).