Searcharxiv⌕ Search
Home/Archive/arXiv

arXiv · 1902.03430

HNLB: Utilizing Hardware Matching Capabilities of NICs for Offloading Stateful Load Balancers

Raphael Durner·Amir Varasteh·Max Stephan·Carmen Mas Machuca·Wolfgang Kellerer
View original source ↗Read source document ↗Export metadata ↓

Abstract

In order to scale web or other services, the load on single instances of the respective service has to be balanced. Many services are stateful such that packets belonging to the same connection must be delivered to the same instance. This requires stateful load balancers which are mostly implemented in software. On the one hand, modern packet processing frameworks supporting software load balancers, such as the Data Plane Development Kit (DPDK), deliver high performance compared to older approaches. On the other hand, common Network Interface Cards (NICs) provide additional matching capabilities that can be utilized for increasing the performance even further and in turn reduce the necessary server resources. In fact, offloading the packet matching to hardware can free up CPU cycles of the servers. Therefore, in this work, we propose the Hybrid NIC-offloading Load Balancer (HNLB), a high performance hybrid hardware-software load balancer, utilizing the NIC-offloading hardware matching capabilities. The results of our performance evaluations show that the throughput using NIC offloading can be increased by up to 50%, compared to a high performance software-only implementation. Furthermore, we investigated the limitations of our proposed approach, e.g., the limited number of possible concurrent connections.

Explore related subjects

cs.NI

Keep this discovery

BibTeXRIS

Raphael Durner, Amir Varasteh, Max Stephan, Carmen Mas Machuca, Wolfgang Kellerer. 2019-02-09. HNLB: Utilizing Hardware Matching Capabilities of NICs for Offloading Stateful Load Balancers. https://arxiv.org/abs/1902.03430

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related papers

arXiv2026

Message-Level Scheduling for RLNC-Coded Multi-Source Traffic

This paper studies weighted decoding-delay minimization for multiple RLNC-coded message streams that compete for finite processing capacity at a destination. Packet arrivals are exogenous, while the scheduler only determines the processing order of packets already available at the destination. A trace-conditioned offline scheduling formulation shows that a batch-release subclass is strongly NP-hard even with a single processing unit. Message-Aware Innovation-Deficit Scheduling (MAIDS) is then developed to prioritize each serviceable message according to its weight and remaining decoding deficit. For a single processing unit, MAIDS is shown to be exactly optimal under nonblocking progressive arrivals with equal weights and under common activation with arbitrary positive weights, while the unrestricted weighted online problem admits no universal deterministic $O(1)$ competitive ratio. Simulation results on streaming and batch benchmarks show that MAIDS consistently reduces weighted decoding delay relative to the tested baselines, remains close to the offline optimum on average, and recovers the predicted exact performance boundaries.

cs.NI↗
arXiv2026

The Towers Were Standing: A Cause Decomposition of Cellular Outages During Hurricane Helene

Hurricane Helene produced the largest absolute cell-site outage in the public FCC record, peaking at 4562 sites. The conventional model is physical: towers destroyed. Helene did destroy over 1700 miles of fibre, but almost none of it was cell sites. We present the first cause-decomposed study of the FCC's Disaster Information Reporting System, reconstructing 80 state-days and 580 county-days from 24 daily filings by two reconciled independent extractions. Damage to cell sites is negligible: 1.1% of attributed cell-site-days across six states, at most 3.8% anywhere. The sites were standing. What took them out divides by terrain: pooled, power dominates at 63.2%, but in mountainous North Carolina severed transport (backhaul) reaches 52.2% against 47.3%, and in Tennessee 69.9%. North Carolina's transport share rises from 7.0% to 85.0% across the event (\r{ho} = 0.92). Seventeen days after landfall, on 15 October, 47 sites lost transport across six contiguous North Carolina counties with no rainfall, no power loss, no damage, and recovery by the next report. Independent active-probe measurement corroborates it: responsive /24s fall 1.02% for twelve hours while Tennessee stays flat. We release the dataset. Backup power is the standard resilience investment; here it addresses the smaller half of the problem.

cs.NI↗
arXiv2026

terms.txt: A Consent and Compensation Protocol for Agentic Web Access

The open web ran on an unwritten bargain: sites admitted crawlers, and search engines sent visitors back. Public measurements show that bargain breaking under AI crawlers and agents. Automated clients now make up most requests, training dominates Cloudflare-classified crawling, and the largest AI platforms fetch thousands of pages for each visitor they return. The web's common control, robots.txt, cannot express identity, purpose, terms, or price, can be circumvented, and newer alternatives are largely proprietary CDN features. We specify terms.txt, a robots.txt-style file for per-path, per-purpose machine-access terms, plus an origin-enforced exchange using Web Bot Auth signatures, signed intent, delegation tokens, HTTP 402 negotiation, and signed receipts. We define what the exchange can enforce, audit, and leave to contract. A dependency-free implementation adds 0.20 to 0.65 ms per request on one vCPU.

cs.NI↗