Offloading Multimedia Proxies using Network Processors

Abstract

A Multimedia Proxy aims to reduce the client startup latency, network load and server load. Such a proxy may be subject to many concurrent clients and experience high processing loads due to for example transcoding or protocol translation. At the same time a high load can be experienced when fetching data from the server. In this thesis, we will explore how to offload a multimedia streaming proxy by using network processing technology. We design, implement and evaluate a proxy prototype on the IXP1200 network processor. As a proof-of-concept we show that the prototype sucessfully offloads the proxy host in the data-plane, i.e., no data packets are processed by the host CPU, leaving it free to perform other CPU intensitive tasks. The prototype is able to do application layer forwarding using approximately a thenth of the cycles compared to a traditional architecture, where all pakcets are processed by the host CPU.