Scheduling processing resources in programmable routers

To provide flexibility in deploying new protocols and services, general-purpose processing engines are being placed in the datapath of routers. Such network processors are typically simple RISC multiprocessors that perform forwarding and custom application processing of packets. The inherent unpredictability of execution time of an arbitrary instruction code poses a significant challenge in providing QoS guarantees for data flows that compete for such processing resources in the network. However, we show that network processing workloads are highly regular and predictable. Using estimates of execution times of various applications on packets of given lengths, we provide a method for admission control and QoS scheduling of processing resources. We present a processor scheduling algorithm called estimation-based fair queuing (EFQ) which uses these estimates, and provides significantly better delay guarantees than processor scheduling algorithms which do not take packet execution times into consideration.