Nokia and ARM want to spruce up the TCP/IP stack to make it better suited to networks that need to operate at high speed and/or low latency.
Legacy TCP/IP is seen as one of the slowing points for a lot of future IT – particularly 5G. LTE was IP-based but it was hell on toast getting it to go and as networks get faster and more virtualised, the TCP/IP stack is failing to keep up.
At the moment Nokia and ARM are using 5G to drive other companies into looking at a
fully revamped TCP/IP stack, optimized for the massively varied use cases of the next mobile generation, for cloud services, and for virtualization and software-defined networking (SDN).
Dubbed the OpenFastPath (OFP) Foundation, founded by Nokia Networks, ARM and industrial IT services player Enea. The cunning plan is to create an open source TCP/IP stack which can accelerate the move towards SDN in carrier and enterprise networks.
AMD, Cavium, Freescale, HPE and the ARM-associated open source initiative, Linaro are all on board with it.
The cunning plan is to create open but secure network applications, which harness IP packet processing. Some want very high throughput, others ultra-low latency others want both and it is probably going to require a flexible standard to make it all go
The standard would support faster packet forwarding, via low IP latency combined with high capacity, and so reduce deployment and management costs by making networks more efficient.
This appears to be based around getting TCP/IP out of the kernel and using them for packet processing involves a number of operations (moving packets into memory, then to the kernel, then back out to the interface) which could be streamlined to reduce latency.
Courtesy-Fud
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