Priority- and Budget-Based Protocol Processing Using The Bottom-Half Mechanism for End-to-End QoS Support

The traditional interrupt-based protocol processing at end hosts has two priority-inversion problems. First, low-priority packets may interrupt and delay high-priority process executionssince interrupts have the highest priority in most operating systems. Second, low-priority packet may delay high priority packets when they arrive almost simultaneously since interrupt processing is performed in a FCFS (first come, first served) order. These problems can be solved by a priority-based protocol processing policy and implementation. However, general priority-based schemes commonly have the problem of starvation and cannot support the each network flow requiring the mutually exclusive QoS since the packets are processed in the FCFS order. Therefore, the priority-based schemes are not appropriate for different QoS-demanding applications. In this paper, we present a bottom-half-based approach that relies on priority- and budget-based processing. The proposed approach allows us to solve both the starvation and priority-inversion problems, and further enables effective QoS isolation between different network connections. This feature also enables bounding the protocol processing time at an end host. We finally show through experiments that the proposed approach achieves QoS isolation and control.