eQUIC Gateway: Maximizing QUIC throughput using a Gateway Service based on eBPF + XDP

Paper presented at: ISCC 2021

Abstract:
QUIC protocol is considered an experimental environment and a straight forward evolution of the TCP protocol. Applications created on top of QUIC demonstrate being more efficient than the regular HTTPS stack. Computational offload to kernel space is used as performance optimization for modern applications and brings with it a series of architectural and algorithmic challenges. This work presents eQUIC Gateway, a kernel space module that filter packets based on real time information exchanged with a user space
QUIC application. Throughout kernel offload technique for filtering packets, eQUIC Gateway increased the packets throughput in 30.9%, reduced 65% of the average HTTPS request duration under attack and reduced by 26.4% the CPU time consumed for filtering packets. The source code of eQUIC Gateway is public available on Github.

Keywords:
Network Reliability, Quality of Service, Web Services, Service Oriented Architectures, Network Design

Project source code:
https://github.com/pantuza/equic

Transcript

1. eQUIC Gateway:
   Maximizing QUIC Throughput using a
   Gateway Service based on eBPF + XDP
   Gustavo Pantuza, Marcos Augusto M. Vieira, Luiz Filipe M. Vieira
   26th IEEE Symposium on Computers and Communications
   Athens, Greece, September 5-8, 2021
   IEEE ISCC 2021
   

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2. Agenda
   ■ Introduction
   ■ QUIC protocol
   ■ XDP + eBPF
   ■ eQUIC
   ■ Experiments
   ■ Results
   ■ Future work
   ■ Conclusion
   

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3. Introduction
   ■ Tail at scale (2013)
   ■ Pluginizing QUIC (2019)
   ■ AccelTCP (2020)
   ■ Making QUIC quicker (2020)
   Image extracted from Cloudflare blog:
   https://blog.cloudflare.com/content/images/2018/07/http-request-over-quic@2x.png
   

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4. Introduction
   ■ Kernel bypass
   ■ Nic Offload
   ■ Kernel offload
   

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5. QUIC protocol
   ■ Being tested since 2012
   ■ Evolution for TCP
   ■ Good results for HTTPs applications
   

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6. QUIC protocol
   

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7. XDP + eBPF
   

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8. eQUIC
   

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9. eQUIC
   lsquic
   ■ Implemented on top of lsquic
   ■ User space library (c lang)
   ■ Kernel space module (eBPF)
   ■ eBPF map
   ■ Quota control
   

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10. eQUIC
    

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11. Experiments ■ 1 Server
    ○ HTTPs application over QUIC
    ○ eQUIC module
    ■ 8 Clients
    ■ Request throughput (reqs/s)
    ■ Request latency (ms)
    ■ CPU usage (µs)
    

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12. Results
    

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13. Results
    

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14. Results
    

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15. Results
    

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16. Results
    

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17. Future work
    ■ implement QUIC encryption offload
    ■ Other gateway services (rate limiting,
    authentication, authorization, ...)
    ■ kernel space as programmable data plane
    eQUIC
    g a t e w a y
    

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18. Conclusion
    ■ +30.9% request throughput
    ■ -65% average request duration
    ■ -26.4% CPU usage for packet filtering
    ■ -89% less system calls
    eQUIC
    g a t e w a y
    https://github.com/pantuza/equic
    

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19. eQUIC Gateway:
    Maximizing QUIC Throughput using a
    Gateway Service based on eBPF + XDP
    Gustavo Pantuza, Marcos Augusto M. Vieira, Luiz Filipe M. Vieira
    26th IEEE Symposium on Computers and Communications
    Athens, Greece, September 5-8, 2021
    IEEE ISCC 2021
    

    View Slide