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Traffic locality characteristics in a parallel forwarding system
Author(s) -
Shi W.,
MacGregor M. H.,
Gburzynski P.
Publication year - 2003
Publication title -
international journal of communication systems
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.344
H-Index - 49
eISSN - 1099-1131
pISSN - 1074-5351
DOI - 10.1002/dac.619
Subject(s) - computer science , locality , locality of reference , workload , cache , scheduling (production processes) , distributed computing , network packet , hash function , computer network , operating system , computer security , philosophy , linguistics , operations management , economics
Due to the widening gap between the performance of microprocessors and that of memory, using caches in a system to take advantage of locality in its workload has become a standard approach to improve overall system performance. At the same time, many performance problems finally reduce to cache performance issues. Locality in system workload is the fact that makes caching possible. In this paper, we first use the reuse distance model to characterize temporal locality in Internet traffic. We develop a model that closely matches the empirical data. We then extend the work to investigate temporal locality in the workload of multi‐processor forwarding systems by comparing locality under different packet scheduling schemes. Our simulations show that for systems with hash‐based schedulers, caching can be an effective way to improve forwarding performance. Based on flow‐level traffic characteristics, we further discuss the relationship between load‐balancing and hash‐scheduling, which yields insights into system design. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.