{"status":"ok","message-type":"work","message-version":"1.0.0","message":{"indexed":{"date-parts":[[2026,4,27]],"date-time":"2026-04-27T16:38:04Z","timestamp":1777307884391,"version":"3.51.4"},"reference-count":44,"publisher":"Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)","issue":"CoNEXT4","license":[{"start":{"date-parts":[[2025,11,25]],"date-time":"2025-11-25T00:00:00Z","timestamp":1764028800000},"content-version":"vor","delay-in-days":1,"URL":"http:\/\/www.acm.org\/publications\/policies\/copyright_policy#Background"}],"funder":[{"name":"ONR Award","award":["N000142412059"],"award-info":[{"award-number":["N000142412059"]}]},{"DOI":"10.13039\/100000001","name":"NSF","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","award":["CNS-2212193,CNS-2213387,CNS-2504469"],"award-info":[{"award-number":["CNS-2212193,CNS-2213387,CNS-2504469"]}],"id":[{"id":"10.13039\/100000001","id-type":"DOI","asserted-by":"publisher"}]},{"name":"INESC-ID","award":["UIDB\/50021\/2020"],"award-info":[{"award-number":["UIDB\/50021\/2020"]}]},{"name":"FCT Scholarship","award":["PRT\/BD\/152195\/2021"],"award-info":[{"award-number":["PRT\/BD\/152195\/2021"]}]},{"name":"ACES Project","award":["101093126"],"award-info":[{"award-number":["101093126"]}]}],"content-domain":{"domain":["dl.acm.org"],"crossmark-restriction":true},"short-container-title":["Proc. ACM Netw."],"published-print":{"date-parts":[[2025,11,24]]},"abstract":"<jats:p>To support high-performance network functions, recent work has explored hybrid architectures that combine the flexibility of general-purpose processors with the performance of the PISA switch architecture. These designs partition code and state between switch platforms and general-purpose servers in pursuit of a ''best of both worlds'' design. However, integrating two separate platforms leads to the age-old challenge of ensuring high throughput and low latency while keeping distributed state consistent.<\/jats:p>\n                  <jats:p>We propose a new, tightly-coupled architecture called SwitchNIC that guarantees consistent state between switch and general-purpose processor, while offering 99-th percentile packet latency of 6 \u03bcs. The key to SwitchNIC's performance is a novel, ''on-path'' state replication protocol, with latency further tightened by implementing general-purpose processing on locally-integrated ARM cores. We prototype SwitchNIC by deploying its state replication algorithms on a Tofino switch with Ethernet-attached ARM-based SmartNICs. SwitchNIC achieves up to 5.2x better energy efficiency and 6.4x better processing latency than server-based systems, none of which completely and correctly support shared state between platforms.<\/jats:p>","DOI":"10.1145\/3768993","type":"journal-article","created":{"date-parts":[[2025,11,25]],"date-time":"2025-11-25T17:09:56Z","timestamp":1764090596000},"page":"1-21","update-policy":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1145\/crossmark-policy","source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":0,"title":["SwitchNIC: An Hybrid Architecture for Network Functions with Fast and Consistent Shared State"],"prefix":"10.1145","volume":"3","author":[{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0003-0157-6450","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Yiran","family":"Lei","sequence":"first","affiliation":[{"name":"Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, USA"}],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0002-6215-3569","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Francisco","family":"Pereira","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"INESC-ID, Instituto Superior T\u00e9cnico, University of Lisbon, Lisbon, Portugal"}],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0002-9505-9528","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Arvind","family":"Krishnamurthy","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"University of Washington, Seattle, USA"}],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0002-8270-4102","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Justine","family":"Sherry","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, USA"}],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]}],"member":"320","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2025,11,25]]},"reference":[{"key":"e_1_2_2_1_1","unstructured":"Broadcom stingray ps1100r. https:\/\/gtmteknoloji.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/08\/PS1100R-PB100.pdf."},{"key":"e_1_2_2_2_1","unstructured":"Dpvs. https:\/\/github.com\/iqiyi\/dpvs."},{"key":"e_1_2_2_3_1","unstructured":"Intel open-tofino. Website. https:\/\/github.com\/barefootnetworks\/Open-Tofino."},{"key":"e_1_2_2_4_1","unstructured":"Intel soc watch. https:\/\/www.intel.com\/content\/www\/us\/en\/docs\/socwatch\/get-started-guide\/2023-1\/overview.html."},{"key":"e_1_2_2_5_1","unstructured":"Intel xeon gold 5218. https:\/\/www.intel.com\/content\/www\/us\/en\/products\/sku\/192444\/intel-xeon-gold-5218-processor-22m-cache-2-30-ghz\/specifications.html."},{"key":"e_1_2_2_6_1","unstructured":"Katran. https:\/\/github.com\/facebookincubator\/katran."},{"key":"e_1_2_2_7_1","unstructured":"Openbox. https:\/\/openboxproject.github.io\/."},{"key":"e_1_2_2_8_1","unstructured":"Watts up pro. https:\/\/arcb.csc.ncsu.edu\/~mueller\/cluster\/arc\/wattsup\/metertools-1.0.0\/docs\/meters\/wattsup\/manual.pdf."},{"key":"e_1_2_2_9_1","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1109\/TNET.2007.904002"},{"key":"e_1_2_2_10_1","first-page":"782","volume-title":"Proceedings of the Annual Conference of the ACM Special Interest Group on Data Communication on the Applications, Technologies, Architectures, and Protocols for Computer Communication, SIGCOMM '20","author":"Ballani Hitesh","year":"2020","unstructured":"Hitesh Ballani, Paolo Costa, Raphael Behrendt, Daniel Cletheroe, Istvan Haller, Krzysztof Jozwik, Fotini Karinou, Sophie Lange, Kai Shi, Benn Thomsen, and Hugh Williams. Sirius: A flat datacenter network with nanosecond optical switching. In Proceedings of the Annual Conference of the ACM Special Interest Group on Data Communication on the Applications, Technologies, Architectures, and Protocols for Computer Communication, SIGCOMM '20, page 782-797, New York, NY, USA, 2020. Association for Computing Machinery."},{"key":"e_1_2_2_11_1","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1109\/ANCS.2015.7110116"},{"key":"e_1_2_2_12_1","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1145\/1879141.1879175"},{"key":"e_1_2_2_13_1","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1145\/2656877.2656890"},{"key":"e_1_2_2_14_1","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1145\/2534169.2486011"},{"key":"e_1_2_2_15_1","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1145\/3629144"},{"key":"e_1_2_2_16_1","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1145\/3359989.3365408"},{"key":"e_1_2_2_17_1","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1016\/j.jalgor.2003.12.001"},{"key":"e_1_2_2_18_1","volume-title":"Proceedings of the 10th Conference on USENIX Security Symposium -","volume":"10","author":"Handley Mark","year":"2001","unstructured":"Mark Handley, Vern Paxson, and Christian Kreibich. Network intrusion detection: evasion, traffic normalization, and end-to-end protocol semantics. In Proceedings of the 10th Conference on USENIX Security Symposium - Volume 10, SSYM'01, USA, 2001. USENIX Association."},{"key":"e_1_2_2_19_1","volume-title":"Network and Distributed System Security Symposium","author":"Herzberg Amir","year":"2010","unstructured":"Amir Herzberg and Haya Schulmann. Stealth dos attacks on secure channels. In Network and Distributed System Security Symposium, 2010."},{"key":"e_1_2_2_20_1","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1145\/3281411.3281443"},{"key":"e_1_2_2_21_1","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1145\/3604930.3605713"},{"key":"e_1_2_2_22_1","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1145\/3132747.3132764"},{"key":"e_1_2_2_23_1","first-page":"90","volume-title":"Proceedings of the Annual Conference of the ACM Special Interest Group on Data Communication on the Applications, Technologies, Architectures, and Protocols for Computer Communication, SIGCOMM '20","author":"Kim Daehyeok","year":"2020","unstructured":"Daehyeok Kim, Zaoxing Liu, Yibo Zhu, Changhoon Kim, Jeongkeun Lee, Vyas Sekar, and Srinivasan Seshan. Tea: Enabling state-intensive network functions on programmable switches. In Proceedings of the Annual Conference of the ACM Special Interest Group on Data Communication on the Applications, Technologies, Architectures, and Protocols for Computer Communication, SIGCOMM '20, page 90-106, New York, NY, USA, 2020. Association for Computing Machinery."},{"key":"e_1_2_2_24_1","first-page":"1257","volume-title":"20th USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI 23)","author":"Kim Daehyeok","year":"2023","unstructured":"Daehyeok Kim, Vyas Sekar, and Srinivasan Seshan. ExoPlane: An operating system for On-Rack switch resource augmentation. In 20th USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI 23), pages 1257-1272, Boston, MA, April 2023. USENIX Association."},{"key":"e_1_2_2_25_1","unstructured":"Yiran Lei and Francisco Pereira. Switchnic artifact. https:\/\/github.com\/A-Dying-Pig\/SwitchNIC."},{"key":"e_1_2_2_26_1","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1145\/3544216.3544257"},{"key":"e_1_2_2_27_1","first-page":"31","volume-title":"13th USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI 16)","author":"Li Xiaozhou","year":"2016","unstructured":"Xiaozhou Li, Raghav Sethi, Michael Kaminsky, David~G. Andersen, and Michael~J. Freedman. Be fast, cheap and in control with SwitchKV. In 13th USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI 16), pages 31-44, Santa Clara, CA, March 2016. USENIX Association."},{"key":"e_1_2_2_28_1","first-page":"311","volume-title":"13th USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI 16)","author":"Li Yuliang","year":"2016","unstructured":"Yuliang Li, Rui Miao, Changhoon Kim, and Minlan Yu. FlowRadar: A better NetFlow for data centers. In 13th USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI 16), pages 311-324, Santa Clara, CA, March 2016. USENIX Association."},{"key":"e_1_2_2_29_1","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1145\/3098822.3098824"},{"key":"e_1_2_2_30_1","first-page":"785","volume-title":"18th USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI 21)","author":"Sapio Amedeo","year":"2021","unstructured":"Amedeo Sapio, Marco Canini, Chen-Yu Ho, Jacob Nelson, Panos Kalnis, Changhoon Kim, Arvind Krishnamurthy, Masoud Moshref, Dan Ports, and Peter Richtarik. Scaling distributed machine learning with In-Network aggregation. In 18th USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI 21), pages 785-808. USENIX Association, April 2021."},{"key":"e_1_2_2_31_1","first-page":"1237","volume-title":"20th USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI 23)","author":"Scazzariello Mariano","year":"2023","unstructured":"Mariano Scazzariello, Tommaso Caiazzi, Hamid Ghasemirahni, Tom Barbette, Dejan Kosti\u0107, and Marco Chiesa. A High-Speed stateful packet processing approach for tbps programmable switches. In 20th USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI 23), pages 1237-1255, Boston, MA, April 2023. USENIX Association."},{"key":"e_1_2_2_32_1","first-page":"67","volume-title":"14th USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI 17)","author":"Sharma Kr.","year":"2017","unstructured":"Naveen~Kr. Sharma, Antoine Kaufmann, Thomas Anderson, Arvind Krishnamurthy, Jacob Nelson, and Simon Peter. Evaluating the power of flexible packet processing for network resource allocation. In 14th USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI 17), pages 67-82, Boston, MA, March 2017. USENIX Association."},{"key":"e_1_2_2_33_1","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1145\/3050220.3063772"},{"key":"e_1_2_2_34_1","first-page":"405","volume-title":"18th USENIX Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation (OSDI 24)","author":"Skiadopoulos Athinagoras","year":"2024","unstructured":"Athinagoras Skiadopoulos, Zhiqiang Xie, Mark Zhao, Qizhe Cai, Saksham Agarwal, Jacob Adelmann, David Ahern, Carlo Contavalli, Michael Goldflam, Vitaly Mayatskikh, Raghu Raja, Daniel Walton, Rachit Agarwal, Shrijeet Mukherjee, and Christos Kozyrakis. High-throughput and flexible host networking for accelerated computing. In 18th USENIX Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation (OSDI 24), pages 405-423, Santa Clara, CA, July 2024. USENIX Association."},{"key":"e_1_2_2_35_1","first-page":"631","volume-title":"16th USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI 19)","author":"Wang Xiang","year":"2019","unstructured":"Xiang Wang, Yang Hong, Harry Chang, KyoungSoo Park, Geoff Langdale, Jiayu Hu, and Heqing Zhu. Hyperscan: A fast multi-pattern regex matcher for modern CPUs. In 16th USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI 19), pages 631-648, Boston, MA, February 2019. USENIX Association."},{"key":"e_1_2_2_36_1","first-page":"299","volume-title":"15th USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI 18)","author":"Woo Shinae","year":"2018","unstructured":"Shinae Woo, Justine Sherry, Sangjin Han, Sue Moon, Sylvia Ratnasamy, and Scott Shenker. Elastic scaling of stateful network functions. In 15th USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI 18), pages 299-312, Renton, WA, April 2018. USENIX Association."},{"key":"e_1_2_2_37_1","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.5555\/3488766.3488777"},{"key":"e_1_2_2_38_1","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1145\/3230543.3230544"},{"key":"e_1_2_2_39_1","first-page":"1345","volume-title":"19th USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI 22)","author":"Zeng Chaoliang","year":"2022","unstructured":"Chaoliang Zeng, Layong Luo, Teng Zhang, Zilong Wang, Luyang Li, Wenchen Han, Nan Chen, Lebing Wan, Lichao Liu, Zhipeng Ding, Xiongfei Geng, Tao Feng, Feng Ning, Kai Chen, and Chuanxiong Guo. Tiara: A scalable and efficient hardware acceleration architecture for stateful layer-4 load balancing. In 19th USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI 22), pages 1345-1358, Renton, WA, April 2022. USENIX Association."},{"key":"e_1_2_2_40_1","first-page":"171","volume-title":"19th USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI 22)","author":"Zeno Lior","year":"2022","unstructured":"Lior Zeno, Dan R. K. Ports, Jacob Nelson, Daehyeok Kim, Shir Landau-Feibish, Idit Keidar, Arik Rinberg, Alon Rashelbach, Igor De-Paula, and Mark Silberstein. SwiSh: Distributed shared state abstractions for programmable switches. In 19th USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI 22), pages 171-191, Renton, WA, April 2022. USENIX Association."},{"key":"e_1_2_2_41_1","first-page":"283","volume-title":"Proceedings of the Annual Conference of the ACM Special Interest Group on Data Communication on the Applications, Technologies, Architectures, and Protocols for Computer Communication, SIGCOMM '20","author":"Zhang Kaiyuan","year":"2020","unstructured":"Kaiyuan Zhang, Danyang Zhuo, and Arvind Krishnamurthy. Gallium: Automated software middlebox offloading to programmable switches. In Proceedings of the Annual Conference of the ACM Special Interest Group on Data Communication on the Applications, Technologies, Architectures, and Protocols for Computer Communication, SIGCOMM '20, page 283-295, New York, NY, USA, 2020. Association for Computing Machinery."},{"key":"e_1_2_2_42_1","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1145\/2940147.2940155"},{"key":"e_1_2_2_43_1","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1145\/3452296.3472892"},{"key":"e_1_2_2_44_1","first-page":"1083","volume-title":"14th USENIX Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation (OSDI 20)","author":"Zhao Zhipeng","year":"2020","unstructured":"Zhipeng Zhao, Hugo Sadok, Nirav Atre, James~C. Hoe, Vyas Sekar, and Justine Sherry. Achieving 100gbps intrusion prevention on a single server. In 14th USENIX Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation (OSDI 20), pages 1083-1100. USENIX Association, November 2020."}],"container-title":["Proceedings of the ACM on Networking"],"original-title":[],"language":"en","link":[{"URL":"https:\/\/dl.acm.org\/doi\/pdf\/10.1145\/3768993","content-type":"application\/pdf","content-version":"vor","intended-application":"syndication"},{"URL":"https:\/\/dl.acm.org\/doi\/pdf\/10.1145\/3768993","content-type":"unspecified","content-version":"vor","intended-application":"similarity-checking"}],"deposited":{"date-parts":[[2026,4,27]],"date-time":"2026-04-27T15:49:08Z","timestamp":1777304948000},"score":1,"resource":{"primary":{"URL":"https:\/\/dl.acm.org\/doi\/10.1145\/3768993"}},"subtitle":[],"short-title":[],"issued":{"date-parts":[[2025,11,24]]},"references-count":44,"journal-issue":{"issue":"CoNEXT4","published-print":{"date-parts":[[2025,11,24]]}},"alternative-id":["10.1145\/3768993"],"URL":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1145\/3768993","relation":{},"ISSN":["2834-5509"],"issn-type":[{"value":"2834-5509","type":"electronic"}],"subject":[],"published":{"date-parts":[[2025,11,24]]},"assertion":[{"value":"2025-11-25","order":3,"name":"published","label":"Published","group":{"name":"publication_history","label":"Publication History"}}]}}