10 GBPS flow aggregation using commodity hardware

Abstract

This paper proposes a flow aggregation application used on general-purpose hardware with a focus on low resource usage. The software is written using DPDK which enables high-speed packet processing on commodity hardware. The solution can handle 10 Gbps line rate traffic with 5 CPU cores while aggregating over 20 different flow metrics. It can handle over 5,000,000 concurrent flows with an upper limit of 12,582,912 concurrent flows stored in its data structures. In this paper, we show the system design choices and technologies used to process such traffic.