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Software Traffic Management Architecture for Multimedia Flows over a Real-Time Microkernel

Yoshito TOBE, Yosuke TAMURA, Hideyuki TOKUDA

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Summary :

Traffic management schemes such as Connection Admission Control (CAC), policing, and traffic shaping are important to provide multimedia communications with better Quality of Service (QoS). In the conventional model, admission control and policing are done at intermediate nodes, and traffic shaping is done at the edge of a network. However, QoS of communications should be defined between tasks or threads rather than between hosts. Therefore traffic management inside a host is as important as that in networks. We propose software-based traffic management architecture over a real-time microkernel. The architecture focuses on the interface between a network driver and user threads calling the driver. We categorized services of communication threads into three classes: Real-Time at Guaranteed Rate (RT-GR), Real-Time at Available Rate (RT-AR), and Best-Effort (BE). Our architecture is designed for an environment containing a mixture of these services. In the architecture, a sender periodic thread of RT-GR or RT-AR is executed such that the sending rate matches a user-specified rate. The network driver monitors the per-flow rate of injected data and discards the data if the injected rate exceeds the user-specified rate. To avoid the continuous discarding of data, the sending thread can adjust its sending rate by periodically looking at logged data concerning the rate. RT-AR service can achieve more than the specified rate when bandwidth is available. The scheme of software traffic management is effective in attaining higher throughput not only for full-duplex Ethernet but also for ATM because the difference of rate between hardware and software is reduced. In this paper, we describe the design and implementation of the software-based traffic management architecture on Real-Time Mach. The results of performance evaluations demonstrate that our traffic management scheme performs well for full-duplex Ethernet.

Publication
IEICE TRANSACTIONS on Communications Vol.E82-B No.12 pp.2116-2125
Publication Date
1999/12/25
Publicized
Online ISSN
DOI
Type of Manuscript
PAPER
Category
Communication Software

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