Abstract
The continuing Internet bandwidth explosion and the advent of new applications have created great challenges for network forwarding devices, e.g., IPS and Firewall. With network bandwidth doubling about twice as fast as CPU performance, the problem shows. Consequently, more and more systems designers are choosing to distribute the workload across multiple CPUs, using symmetric multi-processing (SMP). Workload distribution is critical to the performance of SMP architecture. This thesis introduces a novel system to balance the scheduled traffic over multiple processing cores maintaining in-order service. We present a multi-layered load-balancer which provides higher performance and better distribution as number of processors increases. Also, we introduce early filtering mechanism which can higher system performance, decrease memory usage and lower packet latency. Based on measurements of Internet traffic, the simulation results show that our mechanism provides lower average delay and better workload distribution compared with other load-balancing system.