Maximizing Throughput: Burst-Aware Packet Scheduling in Parallel Forwarding Systems

1. Parallel Forwarding: Scheduling Bursts without Reordering Packets Dr. M.H. MacGregor Department of Computing Science University of Alberta Packet scheduling in parallel forwarding systems is a difficult problem. Two major goals of a scheduler that distributes incoming packets to multiple forwarding engines are to achieve high system utilization by balancing the load evenly among the multiple engines, and to maintain packet ordering within individual flows. Additionally, from the viewpoint of overall performance, the system should exhibit good cache coherence by preserving temporal locality in the workload of each individual forwarding engine. This talk will illustrate how the burstiness in Internet flows can be exploited to improve the performance of a scheduler. Specifically, TCP flows, which contribute over 90 percent of current Internet traffic, are transmitted in bursts with relatively large delays between bursts. The presentation will include performance results for a load balancing scheme based on this insight. Thursday, November 10th, 1 pm, E2-461 EITC Department of Computer ScienceCS Seminar Series