Performance Evaluation of Stateless Firewalling: Host-Based, SmartNIC, and P4 Switch
Sergio Elizalde, Ali Mazloum, Samia Choueiri, Elie F. Kfoury, Jorge Crichigno · 2025
In modern data centers, traditional software-based firewalls often struggle to keep up with the growing demands for robust security. One adopted approach to improve the packet processing efficiency is through software acceleration techniques like the Data Plane Development Kit (DPDK), which significantly enhances the performance of software-based firewalls. Another approach is to offload the firewall functionalities to the hardware either using the new generation of Network Interface Cards (SmartNICs) or by using P4 Programmable Data Plane (PDP) switches. SmartNICs integrate dedicated processing units optimized to efficiently handle networking tasks, including security. P4 PDP switches enable custom packet processing in the data plane, allowing security applications to run at line rates within the network. This study compares the performance of stateless firewalls implemented using nftables (host-based), DPDK (host-based), DOCA Flow and OvS hardware (SmartNIC-based), and P4 (PDP-based). It evaluates the achievable throughput and processing latency for the five implementations under different testing scenarios. It also compares the CPU utilization of the host-based implementations. The results demonstrate that while the software acceleration technique significantly enhances host-side performance, SmartNIC-based and PDP-based firewalls provide a superior performance over all software-based implementations.