Nokia Networks has partnered with ARM and sofware services firm, Enea to establish the OpenFastPath (OFP) Foundation, an initiative to develop a new high performance TCP/IP stack that will provide enhanced performance for SDN-ready network functions. The new TCP/IP stack will be open source-based, designed to provide reduced IP latency, higher capacity and thus faster packet forwarding, and lower implementation costs, meeting the stringent requirements for core and radio applications in the cloud.
The TCP/IP stack implementation uses the Free Berkeley Software Distribution (FreeBSD) operating system, and includes User Datagram Protocol (UDP), Transmission Control Protocol (TCP), and Internet Control Message Protocol (ICMP), said Nokia Networks. It will be optimized for OpenDataPlane (ODP) programming interfaces, with a focus on leveraging hardware acceleration through ODP. It will be available for all major processor architectures, including ARM, x86, MIPS and PowerPC.
Charlene Marini, Vice President, Segment Marketing, ARM
Collaborative open source initiatives such as the OFP Foundation are fundamental in realizing a networking infrastructure built on flexible and heterogeneous compute platforms.
Henri Tervonen, Vice President, Mobile Broadband Architecture at Nokia Networks
The OpenFastPath TCP/IP stack will directly affect the speed and capacity of the IP transport layer, helping accelerate the performance of SDN-ready network applications for the benefit of end users.
