Carrier-Scale Packet Processing Architecture Using Interleaved 3D-Stacked DRAM and Its Analysis

Abstract

New network services such as the Internet of Things and edge computing are accelerating the increase in traffic volume, the number of connected devices, and the diversity of communication. Next generation carrier network infrastructure should be much more scalable and adaptive to rapid increase and divergence in network demand with much lower cost. A more virtualization-aware, flexible and inexpensive system based on general-purpose hardware is necessary to transform the traditional carrier network into a more adaptive, next generation network. In this paper, we propose an architecture for carrier-scale packet processing that is based on interleaved 3 dimensional (3D)-stacked dynamic random access memory (DRAM) devices. The proposed architecture enhances memory access concurrency by leveraging vault-level parallelism and bank interleaving of 3D-stacked DRAM. The proposed architecture uses the hash-function-based distribution of memory requests to each set of vault and bank; a significant portion of the full carrier-scale tables. We introduce an analytical model of the proposed architecture for two traffic patterns; one with random memory request arrivals and one with bursty arrivals. By using the model, we calculate the performance of a typical Internet protocol routing application as a benchmark of carrier-scale packet processing wherein main memory accesses are inevitable. The evaluation shows that the proposed architecture achieves around 80 Gbps for carrier-scale packet processing involving both random and bursty request arrivals.