Chu “An Efficient Buffer Management in a Network Interface Card

Summary This paper proposes a dynamic packet buffer management algorithm for a protocol processor in a network terminal. The protocol processor is to handle high-speed data streams, more than 10 Gb/s, in a network interface card (NIC). There are two types of packet buffer management algorithms, static and dynamic. In general, the dynamic buffer management algorithms work better than the static ones for reducing the packet loss ratio. However, conventional dynamic buffer management algorithms do not utilize packet buffer memory efficiently. Therefore, we propose an algorithm, which contributes to fairness and full utilization of the packet buffer memory. Our experimental results show that the proposed algorithm improves the packet loss ratio by 13.5 % to 18.5% compared to conventional dynamic algorithms