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HybridMesh: A Hardware-software Hybrid Approach for Accelerating Service Mesh Ingress#

NSDI '26 digest Program Core pick 4–6 May 2026

Abstract Paper Slides Recording

Myoungsung You (University of Seoul), Jaehyun Nam (Dankook University), Minjae Seo (ETRI), Taejune Park (Chonnam National University), Seungwon Shin (KAIST)

Play the recording: HybridMesh: A Hardware-software Hybrid Approach for Accelerating Service Mesh Ingress

  • Why: The ingress gateway is the spot where service-mesh overhead is worst, and the paper quantifies it: up to 4x throughput loss from CPU-intensive traffic analysis plus a convoluted forwarding path. A clean answer to the "sidecar or no sidecar" debate's ingress half.
  • What: A hybrid ingress gateway that puts traffic analysis and routing on a SmartNIC, augmented by a lightweight CPU-side proxy for features that don't fit the hardware. 4.4x HTTP throughput over existing gateways; 2.3x cost-effectiveness and 2.8x power-efficiency versus software-only or hardware-only designs.
  • How: Split the gateway data path — SmartNIC handles per-packet analysis and forwarding; the CPU proxy retains flexible traffic-management features — so neither the fully-software nor fully-hardware extreme is forced.
  • Where applicable: Any Istio/Envoy-style service mesh with hardware offload available; research prototype (testbed evaluation, not production), so treat numbers as best-case. The hybrid split principle is the transferable part.