Talks

6LoWPAN stands for IPv6 over Low-Rate Wireless Area Network and was original specified for 802.15.4 wireless networks. The IEEE 802.15.4 wireless standard is such Low-Rate WPAN standard. The 6LoWPAN stack provides an adaptation layer to run IPv6 on top of a specific link-layer like 802.15.4.

There are plenty of blogs and documentation detailing how to fine tune the Linux networking stack for improved performance (throughput, latency, scalability, etc.). Some of them contradict each other and most of them are definitely not up-to-date with the latest changes available on Linux today, nor with the latest CPU families.

We have taken a step back; starting from what is known to be the best-in-class setup for throughput (and similarly for latency), we began analysing the Linux networking stack performance via the Linux profiling tool Perf.

We have a number of L3 tunnelling mechanisms for the cloud such as VXLAN, Geneve, GUE etc. In addition we also have have new socket types like PF_RDS and the kcm proposal which tunnel over tcp from the socket layer and have their own set of challenges. See http://www.spinics.net/lists/netdev/msg347648.html.

In all these cases, the L3 socket is a kernel socket that is transparently created in the kernel, and over which tenant/user-space/application data is tunnelled.