An Efficient Sorting Techniques for Priority Queues in High-Speed Networks

A prominent challenge faced by networks today, is to provide high data rate with minimal loss of high priority packets. A router normally maintains a multitude of queues, one for every interface, that accommodate packets scheduled to go out on that interface. The management and optimizing process of queues to improve the waiting time for end users is known as Queue Management. A high speed Priority Queue Manager (PQM) which guarantees quality of service (QoS) is pivotal in the demanding networking environment that we have today. Quality of service (QoS) cite to whichever technology that administer data traffic to minimize the loss of packets, latency and network jitters. The queuing function is carried out by the Queue Manager (QM). The QM, in this paper, sorts the incoming data packets according to their priorities. This PQM carries out two basic operations- enqueue on an incoming packet and dequeue for returning a packet from the queue. The proposed PQM is coded in Verilog HDL and synthesized using Cadence Encounter RTL Compiler. The proposed queue manager is found to consume less power and has less delay. Also, in order to minimize the packet loss, we use a method to reduce the transmission rate of packets depending on the size of the queue. With the proposed method of sorting only the least priority packets are dropped from the queue rather than dropping packets of any priority.