How modern NICs speed up Packet-Processing Performance of PC-Systems

To ful ll the increasing demand of higher network speeds, ethernet standards and corresponding network adapters are commercially available nowadays, which enable transfer rates of up to 10Gb/s. However the technology above the ethernet layer, especially the IP and TCP protocols, were not changed and optimized that rapidly, hence processing packets in these upper layers represent a bottleneck. Also popular additional high level features like IPSec require even more work to be done for packet processing. In this paper, a set of advanced methods is described, which are currently already implemented in the intel 82599 NIC controller, to speed up packet processing by optimizing and maxing out the potential of network interface cards. This includes taking over work of higher protocol levels and thus reducing the mentioned bottleneck of network speed development.