Uploaded June 2026 | Updated September 2026, 3 weeks ago
HybridMesh: A Hardware-software Hybrid Approach for Accelerating Service Mesh Ingress
Myoungsung You, University of Seoul; Jaehyun Nam, Dankook University; Minjae Seo, ETRI; Taejune Park, Chonnam National University; Seungwon Shin, KAIST
Service meshes have become essential for enabling microservice communication in cloud environments. Despite their benefits, they impose significant network overhead. We identify the ingress gateway, a main entry point for external traffic, has emerged as a major performance bottleneck. This overhead stems from two key limitations of current ingress gateways: (1) CPU-intensive traffic analysis and (2) a complex packet forwarding path. Our analysis shows that these inefficiencies can reduce network throughput by up to 4× while substantially increasing CPU utilization. In response, we propose HybridMesh, a hardware-software hybrid ingress gateway that leverages a SmartNIC for high-performance traffic analysis and efficient traffic routing. This process is augmented by a lightweight CPU-side proxy that provides various traffic management features not suitable for SmartNIC execution. Evaluations show that HybridMesh outperforms existing ingress gateways, achieving a 4.4× increase in HTTP throughput. Furthermore, compared to software-only and hardware-only designs, our hybrid design delivers 2.3× higher cost-effectiveness and 2.8× better power-efficiency.
View the full NSDI '26 program at usenix.org/conference/nsdi26/technical-sessions
HybridMesh: A Hardware-software Hybrid Approach for Accelerating Service Mesh Ingress
Myoungsung You, University of Seoul; Jaehyun Nam, Dankook University; Minjae Seo, ETRI; Taejune Park, Chonnam National University; Seungwon Shin, KAIST
Service meshes have become essential for enabling microservice communication in cloud environments. Despite their benefits, they impose significant network overhead. We identify the ingress gateway, a main entry point for external traffic, has emerged as a major performance bottleneck. This overhead stems from two key limitations of current ingress gateways: (1) CPU-intensive traffic analysis and (2) a complex packet forwarding path. Our analysis shows that these inefficiencies can reduce network throughput by up to 4× while substantially increasing CPU utilization. In response, we propose HybridMesh, a hardware-software hybrid ingress gateway that leverages a SmartNIC for high-performance traffic analysis and efficient traffic routing. This process is augmented by a lightweight CPU-side proxy that provides various traffic management features not suitable for SmartNIC execution. Evaluations show that HybridMesh outperforms existing ingress gateways, achieving a 4.4× increase in HTTP throughput. Furthermore, compared to software-only and hardware-only designs, our hybrid design delivers 2.3× higher cost-effectiveness and 2.8× better power-efficiency.
View the full NSDI '26 program at usenix.org/conference/nsdi26/technical-sessions
