thentication lifetime of the IKE SA expires. Reauthentication shall not lead to a noticeable degradation of service. Performance Off-the-shelf, Linux provides a feature-rich networking environment including functional support for most components required for deployment of a CU/DU or RU product. This networking solution is part of the Linux kernel. Whilst performant enough for initial product development, there are a few challenges to using the Linux kernel stacks for commercial product development, all of them related to performance: Memory management. All networking related components in the kernel use a common data structure for packet processing: sk_buff. This data structure maintains all required information for packet processing such as pointers to header and payload and packet queueing capabilities implemented as double linked lists. The sk_buff datastructure is not natively visible to Linux user given that Linux, by design, strictly separates kernel and user space components. This means that user space programs that need access to the packets end up using a memory copy operation to convert the sk_buff structure to some other structure that the user-space accesses. This is exactly what is being done when you open a socket from a user space application and do packet receive/transmit operations. The challenge here is that this memory copy operation is costly, both because the CPU is wasting time reading and writing (copying) packet payload that it has no visibility into, but also from a memory bandwidth perspective, because each read/write operation loads the memory bus more heavily. Accelerator access. Moving towards the embedded processor space, processors often include specialized accelerators to speed up processor-intensive functionality such as ciphering (say, IPSec) or egress QoS/Traffic Management. Access to these accelerators is proprietary in nature and supported in a limited fashion by the Linux kernel-either feature-limited or delayed till much after the processor is released to the market. As a re