Creating portable and efficient packet processing applications

Network processors are special-purpose programmable units deployed in many modern high-speed network devices, which combine flexibility and high performance. However, software development for these platforms is traditionally cumbersome due both to the lack of adequate programming abstractions and to the impossibility of reusing the same software on different hardware platforms. In this context, the Network Virtual Machine (NetVM) aims at defining an abstraction layer for the development of portable and efficient data-plane packet processing applications. Portability and efficiency are achieved altogether by virtualizing the hardware and by capturing in the programming model the peculiar characteristics of the application domain. This paper validates the NetVM model, demonstrating that the proposed abstraction coupled with a proper implementation of the NetVM Framework is able to provide generality (i.e., capability to support a wide range of applications), software portability across heterogeneous network processor architectures, and efficiency of the generated code, often exceeding the one obtained using state-of-the-art compilers.