Scheduling Computations on a Programmable Router

Report ID: TR-615-00
Author: Peterson, Larry / Karlin, Scott C. / Bavier, Andy / Qie, Xiaohu
Date: 2000-06-00
Pages: 14
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Abstract:

It is becoming increasingly common for routers to compute on packets in addition to forwarding them, thereby exposing the problem of how the router's CPU cycles are scheduled. To complicate matters, this scheduling decision may be constrained by the desire to differentiate the level of service given different packet flows. This paper addresses the issue of scheduling computations on a programmable router. Its main contributions are to define a process architecture that allows computations to be scheduled in a meaningful way, and to identify the key issues that make this architecture difficult to implement in practice.