KeepON: Supporting Deterministic Traffic on Standard NICs
summary
Claim: software-only driver forces commodity NICs to behave like hardware schedulers by keeping the NIC transmitting a stream of continuous fixed-size placeholder packets and swapping in scheduled packets at precise ring indices. Prototype modifies the standard NIC driver on a Raspberry Pi driver prototype and uses a polling-mode DMA loop; dummy frames use crafted CRC dropped at first-hop switch. Results show 3.7 ns send jitter (vs 7.7 ns hardware IGB and ~5 µs default), up to 130× better scheduling accuracy, and <10% CPU.
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chapters (13)
- 0:00KeepON introduction
- 1:02Deterministic networking background
- 3:51TSN end station challenges
- 5:38End station jitter problem
- 7:01Hardware scheduling limits
- 7:22KeepON core idea
- 10:13KeepON architecture
- 12:01Hardware clock with PDP
- 13:26Scheduling logic
- 14:29Evaluation against hardware and Linux drivers
- 15:35CPU overhead tuning
- 16:21NASA RAC validation
- 17:24Q&A
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