Real-time applications are becoming more and more popular, and due to the demand for more compact and portable user devices, offloading terminal processes to edge servers is being considered. Moreover, it is necessary to process packets with low latency on edge servers, which are often virtualized for operability. When trying to achieve low-latency networking, the increase in server power consumption due to performance tuning and busy polling for fast packet receiving becomes a problem. Thus, we design and implement a low-latency and energy-efficient networking system, energy-efficient kernel busy poll (EE-KBP), which meets four requirements: (A) low latency in the order of microseconds for packet forwarding in a virtual server, (B) lower power consumption than existing solutions, (C) no need for application modification, and (D) no need for software redevelopment with each kernel security update. EE-KBP sets a polling thread in a Linux kernel that receives packets with low latency in polling mode while packets are arriving, and when no packets are arriving, it sleeps and lowers the CPU operating frequency. Evaluations indicate that EE-KBP achieves microsecond-order low-latency networking under most traffic conditions, and 1.4× to 3.1× higher throughput with lower power consumption than NAPI used in a Linux kernel.

Packet processing on commodity hardware is a cost-efficient and flexible alternative to specialized networking hardware. However, virtualizing dedicated networking hardware as a virtual machine (VM) or a container on a commodity server results in performance problems, such as longer latency and lower throughput. This paper focuses on obtaining a low-latency networking system in a VM and a container. We reveal mechanisms that cause millisecond-scale networking delays in a VM through a series of experiments. To eliminate such delays, we design and implement a low-latency networking system, kernel busy poll (KBP), which achieves three goals: (1) microsecond-scale tail delays and higher throughput than conventional solutions are achieved in a VM and a container; (2) application customization is not required, so applications can use the POSIX sockets application program interface; and (3) KBP software does not need to be developed for every Linux kernel security update. KBP can be applied to both a VM configuration and a container configuration. Evaluation results indicate that KBP achieves microsecond-scale tail delays in both a VM and a container. In the VM configuration, KBP reduces maximum round-trip latency by more than 98% and increases the throughput by up to three times compared with existing NAPI and Open vSwitch with the Data Plane Development Kit (OvS-DPDK). In the container configuration, KBP reduces maximum round-trip latency by 21% to 96% and increases the throughput by up to 1.28 times compared with NAPI.