ShareStreams-V: A Virtualized QoS Packet Scheduling Accelerator

This paper introduces a virtualized FPGA-based accelerator for wire speed scheduling of packet streams under quality of service constraints. This work implements the dynamic window constrained scheduling algorithm and builds upon our previous custom accelerator by adding support for virtualization. This implementation is parametric, permitting tradeoffs between packet decision latency, decision throughput, and the number of virtual packet schedulers supported. When scheduling streams from multiple processes, ShareStreams-V 1 is able to schedule minimal size packets faster than one decision per 51.2 ns for up to 64 streams, the throughput required for 10 gbps Ethernet. The bottleneck currently is the host-accelerator HW/SW (PCIe) interface; this may be mitigated using high-speed interconnects/interfaces such as HyperTransport.