Hardware support for controlled interaction of guaranteed and best-effort communication

Real-time communication typically consists of guaranteed packets that must satisfy their delivery deadlines and best-effort packets that can tolerate occasional deadline misses for improved average latency. This paper presents hardware techniques for supporting the coexistence of these two traffic classes in real-time point-to-point networks. A careful selection of routing and switching techniques, coupled with fine-grain arbitration between traffic classes, can allow network adapters to support the diverse performance requirements of best-effort and guaranteed communication. Cycle-level simulations of SPIDER (Scalable Point-to-point Interface DrivER), a network adapter for point-to-point distributed systems, demonstrate the utility of supporting multiple low-level communication policies for different classes of traffic.<>