Intel Threading Building Blocks

Pipelined Components for the Local Network Router

Protocol processing is very frequently organized into a pipeline. The main reason is that it simplifies packet processing by layer and by function. It also allows a functional dataflow parallel programming style. Although these layers and functions must be performed serially on a single packet, when executed with a pipeline we find that different packets may be processed in parallel. The pipeline in the example functionally simulates three stages. Let’s describe each.