Adaptive scheduling to maximize NIC throughput in a COTS router

Abstract

In routers based on commodity off-the-shelf (COTS) hardware and open-source operating systems, there are correlations between the transmission and reception capabilities of individual network interface cards (NICs) and multiple NICs on the same bus because of NIC/bus bottlenecks. To manage the adverse effects of this correlation, we propose an adaptive scheduling mechanism based on system state information, which balances transmission and reception rates and increases the overall forwarding rate.