XpressEth: Concise and efficient converged real-time Ethernet

Abstract

Owing to Ethernet's low cost, high bandwidth and architecture openness, much attention has been paid to develop converged Ethernet to support both time-critical services and conventional communication services on a unified network infrastructure. The greatest challenge here is providing low and deterministic latency for time-critical packets. Recently, the IEEE time sensitive networking task group is launched to address it. However, their framework is complex and unsuitable for commodity switch architecture. In this paper, we propose a concise and efficient converged real-time Ethernet framework called XpressEth, which leverages Dual Preemption mechanism to minimize the delay of time-critical packets, and employs a lightweight Slot Assignment Scheduler to minimize the conflicts among time-critical packets at sources. XpressEth cuts off great burden from both forwarding and scheduling. The simulation results verify that XpressEth can provide ultra-low and deterministic latency for time-critical packets (1.024µ s per hop and zero jitter in 1Gbps network), which is 13× better than time sensitive networking solution, and the side-effect on conventional communication traffic is negligible.