A Chained Forwarding Mechanism for Large Messages

The proliferation of wide-bandwidth network services, e.g. high-definition video (HD video), has made the fragmentation mechanism necessary. However, conventional fragmentation mechanisms apply the same treatment to fragmented and unfragmented packets, thus impeding efficiency and impairing the quality of service. To address this issue, we propose a novel chained forwarding mechanism that integrates the typical features of large message transmission. The proposed mechanism is uniquely confined to the data plane, providing seamless chained forwarding capabilities. Specifically, network devices exclusively process the initial fragment, exempting subsequent fragments from further processing. This reduces the processing delay in network devices, attenuating the forwarding latency caused by Access Control List (ACL) and Longest Prefix Match (LPM). Evaluation results based on the P4 simulator show that the proposed chained forwarding mechanism can reduce 10% of the forwarding latency. Furthermore, the mechanism demonstrates substantial scalability and provides significant performance improvements in large-scale networks.