Increasing the efficiency of network interface card

A Network Interface Card (NIC) is used for receiving the packets, processing the packets, passing the packets to the host processor, and sending the packets to other computers in a network. NIC uses the buffer management algorithm to distribute the buffer space among different applications. An application may use User Datagram Protocol (UDP) or Transmission Control Protocol (TCP), depending upon the type of application. Buffer Management Algorithm for UDP-based applications may be completely different from the one for TCP applications, since in UDP- based applications receiver do not send acknowledgement back to the sender. This thesis proposes two buffer management algorithms: 1) Fairly Shared Dynamic Algorithm (FSDA) for UDP-based applications; 2) Evenly Based Dynamic Algorithm (EBDA) for both UDP and TCP-based applications. FSDA utilizes full buffer memory and reduces the packet losses significantly. EBDA reduces packet losses by taking the packet size factor in summation rather than multiplication. This also helps in maintaining fairness among different applications. For the average network traffic load, the FSDA algorithm improves the packet loss ratio by 18.5 % over the dynamic algorithm and by 13.5% over the DADT, while EBDA improves by 16.7 % over the dynamic algorithm and by 11.8% over the DADT. For the heavy network traffic load, the FSDA algorithm improves the packet loss ratio by 16.8 % over the dynamic algorithm and by 12.5% over the DADT while EBDA improves the packet loss ratio by 16.8 % over the dynamic algorithm and by 12.6% over the DADT. For the actual traffic load, the improvement over DA and DADT is 13.6% and 7.5% for FSDA and 7.6% and 1.9% for EBDA