Efficiency and late data choice in a user-kernel interface for congestion-controlled datagrams

Junwen Lai, Eddie Kohler, Surendar Chandra, Nalini Venkatasubramanian
2005 Multimedia Computing and Networking 2005  
Streaming media servers send many datagrams, very quickly, on many different connections, hopefully without congesting the network. In addition, in order to adapt to constantly changing network conditions, they often demand the capability of late data choice, where they choose which data to send immediately before transmission. In this paper, we present a novel user-kernel interface for congestion-controlled datagram protocols that is both efficient and flexible. Our API consists of a packet
more » ... g located in shared memory. Applications enqueues packet descriptors directly onto the ring, without crossing the user-kernel boundary, and the kernel dequeues packets from the ring and sends them. This minimizes control and data transfers and gives good throughput. In addition, our API provides a mechanism that allows the application to go back and safely change, remove or even reorder previously-enqueued packets, right up until the kernel sends them. This design separates the mechanism for achieving QoS support from any particular QoS policy. We describe the interface and evaluate its performance. By reducing control transfers, the packet ring can even send zerolength packets through the kernel faster than conventional send()-based UDP. Furthermore, on a congested network, an MPEG-like application using our DCCP API can deliver more than twice as many important "I-frames" than a CBR UDP sender in the same network conditions.
doi:10.1117/12.592281 fatcat:mpbulxbfkvgt7aig6h2utexdwe