Title
High-Resolution Timer-Based Packet Pacing Mechanism On The Linux Operating System
Abstract
Packet pacing is a well-known technique for reducing the short-time-scale burstiness of traffic, and software-based packet pacing has been categorized into two approaches: the timer interrupt-based approach and the gap packet-based approach. The former was originally hard to implement for Gigabit class networks because it requires the operating system to handle too frequent periodic timer interrupts, thus incurring a large overhead. On the other hand, a gap packet-based packet pacing mechanism achieves precise pacing without depending on the timer resolution. However, in order to guarantee the accuracy of rate control, the system must be able to transmit packets at the wire rate. In this paper, we propose a high-resolution timer-based packet pacing mechanism that determines the transmission timing of packets by using a sub-microsecond resolution timer. The high-resolution timer is a light-weight mechanism compared to the traditional low-resolution periodic timer. With recent progress in hardware protocol offload technologies and multicore-aware network protocol stacks, we believe high-resolution timer-based packet pacing has become practical. Our experimental results show that the proposed mechanism can work on a wider range of systems without degrading the accuracy of rate control. However, a higher CPU load is observed when the number of traffic classes increases, compared to a gap packet-based pacing mechanism.
Year
DOI
Venue
2011
10.1587/transcom.E94.B.2199
IEICE TRANSACTIONS ON COMMUNICATIONS
Keywords
Field
DocType
packet pacing, high-resolution timer, TCP segmentation offload
Interrupt,Gigabit,Large segment offload,Computer science,Network packet,Computer network,Real-time computing,Watchdog timer,Burstiness,TCP pacing,Timer,Operating system
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
E94B
8
0916-8516
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
1
0.41
7
Authors
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Ryousei Takano15116.12
Tomohiro Kudoh234450.92
Yuetsu Kodama334749.44
Fumihiro Okazaki441.88