Sloth: A Kernel-Bypass Scheduler Maximizing Energy Efficiency under Latency Constraints

(2025) IFIP 2025 Slices Workshop - International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP) Networking 2025 Conference — Location: Limassol, Cyprus (26.May.2025)

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Abstract
In recent years, multi-hundred-gigabit networking applications such as Virtual Network Function (VNF) and Key Value Store (KVS) implementations have relied on kernel-bypass and polling to achieve maximum throughput. However, this performance improvement comes at the expense of high CPU usage and power consumption. This paper first analyses the trade-off between the power consumption, the latency and the throughput of VNF applications. We then present Sloth, an energy-aware scheduler that adapts the number of cores used by an application and their frequency. Sloth uses the information gathered in a training phase to maximize the energy reduction in real time while maintaining a user-provided service-level objective. Sloth manages to reduce CPU power consumption by up to 50% compared to the classical DPDK polling approach with only a 30 μs latency increase. Sloth also saves up to milliseconds of latency compared to state-of-the-art solutions at equivalent power consumption.
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Citations

Delzotti, C., Maistriaux, P., & Barbette, T. (2025). Sloth: A Kernel-Bypass Scheduler Maximizing Energy Efficiency under Latency Constraints. Advances in Information and Communication Technology (AICT). Published. IFIP 2025 Slices Workshop - International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP) Networking 2025 Conference, Limassol, Cyprus.