Gigaflow: Pipeline-Aware Sub-Traversal Caching for Modern SmartNICs

Contributed by: Annus Zulfiqar, University of Michigan Challenge: Modern virtual switches cannot efficiently offload millions of dynamic wildcard rules to SmartNICs because hardware caches are too small, leading to high miss rates and costly software fallbacks. Solution: Gigaflow introduces pipeline-aware sub-traversal caching with Longest Traversal Matching (LTM), decomposing vSwitch pipeline traversals into reusable segments that maximize SmartNIC table utilization and significantly improve ca