A novel hybrid scheme of interrupt enabling - disabling and polling (EDP) for high-speed computer networks

Abstract

Keeping up with modern high-speed networks is a significant challenge for network interface controller (NIC) designers. With the appearance of high-speed networks with link speed reaching ten gigabits per second, the network interfaces become the bottleneck of communication. System performance of Gigabit network hosts can severely be degraded due to interrupt overhead caused by heavy incoming traffic. To eliminate interrupt overhead, different solutions have been proposed in the literature. In this paper, a novel hybrid scheme of interrupt enabling-disabling and polling (EDP) is proposed. The performance of hybrid EDP scheme is compared and its design and implementation aspects are addressed. The study is conducted using a discrete-event simulation. The simulation results are compared with those reported in the previous work done using the Poisson traffic. The results indicate that this new scheme enable the network interface card (NIC) to efficiently support both high throughput and latency-critical applications.