Abstract: QUIC, as an emerging transmission protocol parallel to TCP, follows the TCP research approach. The mainstream research way is hardware offloading, which offloads computation-intensive functional modules to network devices and replaces host CPU computation by hardware processing. However, due to the poor generality of hardware offloading, although its performance is high, it cannot guarantee user programmability. To overcome this limitation, this paper proposes a software offloading model—NanoBPF, which is a protocol offloading model based on the RISC-style many-core DPU (Data Processing Unit). By modifying the Bootloader's startup code, it guides the eBPF (extended Berkeley Packet Filter) code as a runtime environment and offloads encryption and decryption functional modules with high CPU utilization rates in the protocol stack using software. The encryption and decryption functional modules are written in high-level languages (C) and compiled into custom BPF (Berkeley Packet Filter) bytecode dynamically loaded into the DPU. The throughput and fairness of the prototype system are validated using local and Docker-based network topologies. The results show that software offloading of message encryption and decryption can increase the message throughput of the protocol stack by nearly 13%, and under certain conditions, it can ensure link fairness with TCP.

Key words: DPU, encryption/decryption, software offloading, multicore parallelism, eBPF code