OC-48c High-Speed Network PCI Card: Implementation and Evaluation

Kenji SHIMIZU  Tsuyoshi OGURA  Tetsuo KAWANO  Hiroyuki KIMIYAMA  Mitsuru MARUYAMA  

Publication
IEICE TRANSACTIONS on Information and Systems   Vol.E86-D   No.11   pp.2380-2389
Publication Date: 2003/11/01
Online ISSN: 
DOI: 
Print ISSN: 0916-8532
Type of Manuscript: Special Section PAPER (Special Issue on New Technologies in the Internet and their Applications)
Category: 
Keyword: 
SONET/SDH,  TCP/IP,  PCI,  high-speed network,  POS,  MAPOS,  OC-48c,  

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Summary: 
We have developed an OC-48c (2.4 Gbps) PCI-compliant network interface card and drivers with the aim of evaluating the effectiveness of our proposed link layer protocol MAPOS. In this paper, we study the effectiveness of MAPOS particularly from the viewpoint of the influence of packet sizes up to the 64-kbyte jumbo MTU size and the effectiveness of our new implementation of the non-interrupt-driven sending process and interrupt batching receiving process deployed to improve the throughput in short-packet transmissions. Our main findings are as follows;
Enlarging the packet size up to 64-kbyte MTU improves the performance in transmission. OC-48c wire speed is achieved with packet sizes larger than 16 kbytes.
Implementation of the non-interrupt-driven sending process and the interrupt batching receiving process improves the performance of short-packet transmission. In particular, the transmission throughput is improved by 50% when 64-byte short packets are used. The maximum loss-free receive rate is also raised by 50% when 4-kbyte packets arrive.
With a high-performance CPU, the data-transfer speed of the DMA controller for jumbo packets cannot keep up with the packet-queueing speed of the CPU. Our proposed procedure for adaptive algorithm switching method can resolve this problem.
The maximum TCP throughput observed in our measurement using the latest PCs and MAPOS OC-48c PCI card was 2342.5 Mbps. This throughput represents the highest performance in a legacy-PCI-based system according to the results database of the benchmarking software.