Freeway: an order-less user-space framework for non-real-time applications

The demand for high network capacity has been rapidly increasing, such as inter-DC WANs. But the transport over the network with high bandwidth and delay cannot fully utilize the bandwidth because of the inevitable packet loss and the flow control bottleneck caused by the out-of-order data blocked in the receive buffer. We further found that a lot of applications over inter-DC WANs are non-real-time, which are insensitive to data arriving sequence. Thus, we design and implement Freeway, a user-space bulk-data network transfer framework, to improve the bandwidth of these non-real-time applications over inter-DC WANs. Experimental results show that Freeway achieves 100% more bandwidth utilization than Linux TCP stack, and significantly reduces memory cost.