SmartTC: A Real-Time ML-Based Traffic Classification with Smartnic

Real-time network traffic classification plays a crucial role in ensuring Quality of Service and network security, and machine learning (ML) based methods achieve high classification accuracy but induce significant computational overhead. While SmartNIC solutions can offload classification tasks thus reducing CPU burdens, they still suffer from various limitations, manifested in limited computing capabilities, insufficiency in dynamic load handling and high latency from heterogeneous computing architectures. To solve these problems, we propose SmartTC, with three key designs: (1) SmartTC employs hardware-software co-design to optimize SmartNIC processing power, (2) SmartTC adopts a trafficaware dynamic batch submission strategy that adjusts submission policies based on real-time network load, and (3) SmartTC proposes parallel pipeline scheduling that ensures efficient task execution while minimizing communication overhead. Finally, we implement SmartTC on the BlueField-3 DPU and conduct extensive experiments for evaluations, and comparison results demonstrate that SmartTC significantly outperforms existing solutions. For example, it reduces average traffic classification time by up to 16.8% under low loads and 90.9% under high loads. Besides, SmartTC does not affect Bluefield-3 network services, and saves host CPU usage by at least two cores.