Paul J Sprague

US Patent:

20220210119, Jun 30, 2022

Filed:

Mar 18, 2022

Appl. No.:

17/698164

Inventors:

- Portsmouth NH, US
Paul Sprague - North Berwick ME, US
Peter Geremia - Portsmouth NH, US
Sean Moore - Hollis NH, US

International Classification:

H04L 61/2521
H04L 61/2514
H04L 45/00

Abstract:

Network devices that are inserted inline into network links and process in-transit packets may significantly improve their packet-throughput performance by not assigning L3 IP addresses and L2 MAC addresses to their network interfaces and thereby process packets through a logical fast path that bypasses the slow path through the operating system kernel. When virtualizing such Bump-In-The-Wire (BITW) devices for deployment into clouds, the network interfaces must have L3 IP and L2 MAC addresses assigned to them. Thus, packets are processed through the slow path of a virtual BITW device, significantly reducing the performance. By adding new logic to the virtual BITW device and/or configuring proxies, addresses, subnets, and/or routing tables, a virtual BITW device can process packets through the fast path and potentially improve performance accordingly. For example, the virtual BITW device may be configured to enforce a virtual path (comprising the fast path) through the virtual BITW device.