Performance Evaluation of Handling Interrupts Schemes in Gigabit Networks

Multimedia applications over high-speed networks can generate heavy load conditions. When high-speed network end system is involved in processing the network traffic, its performance depends critically on how its tasks are scheduled. Therefore, the polices and mechanism that schedule incoming network traffic and other tasks should guarantee acceptable system throughput, reasonable latency and jitter, reasonable system availability, fair allocation of CPU resources among multimedia traffic reception, packets transmission, protocol processing, application processing, and over all system stability, without imposing excessive overhead. In this paper we compare different schemes for handling interrupts in gigabit networking environment. Moreover, the performance measures of hard timer and soft timer polling schemes used for high-speed network interface with high traffic load are also studied and compared. In addition to the throughput performance metric in which most of the literatures focus on only, other performance metrics such as CPU availability, loss ratio, packet delay are defined and studied.