Just-in-Time Packet State Prefetching

Could information about future incoming packets be used to build more efficient CPU-based packet processors? Can such information be obtained accurately? This paper studies novel packet processing architectures that receive external hints about which packets are soon to arrive, thus enabling prefetching into fast cache memories of the state needed to process them, just-in-time for the packets' arrival. We explore possible approaches to (i) obtain such hints either from network devices or the end hosts in the communication and (ii) use these hints to better utilize cache memories. We show that such information (if accurate) can improve packet processing throughput by at least 50%.