Improving the flexibility of DPDK Service Cores

Abstract: Data Plane Development Kit is a highly used library for creating network applications that can be run on all hardware. Data Plane Development Kit has a component called Service Cores, which allows the main applications to create services that will run independently. These services are manually mapped to specific CPU cores, and are scheduled in a round-robin method. Because of the manual mapping, and the scheduling, the different load for each service can impact the start time for each service. By having services not run when supposed to, the throughput will degrade. In this thesis, we investigate and try to solve the issue by implementing a basic load balancer into the Service Core component. Our results show that an basic load balancer, that will balance upon reaching a CPU upper threshold, will increase the throughput of services while decreasing the delay between each service run.