Marco Liess, M.Sc.

To improve the performance and energy efficiency of a
modern server, SmartNICs can be used to preprocess
incoming packets and gather characteristics on traffic
and processing requirements, as well as offer the possibility
to offload and accelerate specific functionalities. In the
context of Data Distribution in Vehicular Networks for
Automated Driving, an existing protocol and software
solution [1] offers the potential for SmartNIC-acceleration.
This state-of-the-art solution relies on selective data
distribution in a ROS2-environment to reduce the amount of
data transferred and thereby improve latency and efficiency.
While the offered software implementation already shows significant improvements, offloading certain protocol and packet processing to the SmartNIC promises much greater gains by avoiding expensive software loops and enabling hardware-accelerated processing. 

The goal of this work is to implement the network protocol developed in [1] in FPGA-hardware, preferably using the P4 framework [2]. An existing implementation of the AMD Vitis Net P4 IP core can be used as a starting point. Further, the image processing can be offloaded to the SmartNIC and accelerated using parallel hardware and the onboard HBM on the SmartNIC's FPGA. This requires a custom RTL implementation of image format transformation and caching logic. The existing software implementation shall be used as a design reference and comparison in terms of performance evaluation.

[1] N. Sperling and R. Ernst, "Reducing Communication Cost and Latency in Autonomous Vehicles with Subscriber-centric Selective Data Distribution," 2024 IEEE 99th Vehicular Technology Conference (VTC2024-Spring), Singapore, Singapore, 2024, pp. 1-7

Prerequisites

With the advent of research on the next generation of mobile communications 6G, LIS is engaged in exploring architectures and architecture extensions for networking hardware, as well as improving the interaction between SmartNIC hardware, operating system, and application software. As 6G aims to support mission-critical applications, the demand for deterministic, real-time processing within network infrastructure has become paramount. The recent mainline integration of the real-time scheduler in Linux presents a unique opportunity to explore how operating system scheduling decisions directly impact networking performance in time-sensitive environments.

The incoming traffic load and with it the computing requirements on network processing nodes such as edge servers can span multiple magnitudes in a matter of milliseconds and less. This makes the task of load balancing and efficient scheduler decisions increasingly difficult, especially considering additional requirements like priority-awareness.

This thesis investigates the critical intersection of Linux scheduling policies and real-time networking performance. The research goals of this thesis include:

• Evaluating the performance implications of different Linux scheduling policies on networking performance
• Analyzing how scheduling decisions affect deterministic behavior in time-sensitive networking applications
• Assessing efficient load balancing mechanisms and the availability of priority-awareness for specific flows
• Identifying and potentially developing SmartNIC extensions to enhance Linux scheduling decisions

Prerequisites

With the advent of research on the next generation of mobile communications 6G, LIS is engaged in exploring architectures and architecture extensions for networking hardware, as well as improving the interaction between SmartNIC hardware, operating system, and application software. As 6G aims to support mission-critical applications, the demand for deterministic, real-time processing within network infrastructure has become paramount. The recent mainline integration of the real-time scheduler in Linux presents a unique opportunity to explore how operating system scheduling decisions directly impact networking performance in time-sensitive environments.

The incoming traffic load and with it the computing requirements on network processing nodes such as edge servers can span multiple magnitudes in a matter of milliseconds and less. This makes the task of load balancing and efficient scheduler decisions increasingly difficult, especially considering additional requirements like priority-awareness.

This thesis investigates the critical intersection of Linux scheduling policies and real-time networking performance. The research goals of this thesis include:

• Evaluating the performance implications of different Linux scheduling policies on networking performance
• Analyzing how scheduling decisions affect deterministic behavior in time-sensitive networking applications
• Assessing efficient load balancing mechanisms and the availability of priority-awareness for specific flows
• Identifying and potentially developing SmartNIC extensions to enhance Linux scheduling decisions

Prerequisites

With the advent of research on the next generation of mobile communications 6G, LIS is engaged in exploring architectures and architecture extensions for networking hardware, as well as improving the interaction between SmartNIC hardware, operating system, and application software. As 6G aims to support mission-critical applications, the demand for deterministic, real-time processing within network infrastructure has become paramount. The recent mainline integration of the real-time scheduler in Linux presents a unique opportunity to explore how operating system scheduling decisions directly impact networking performance in time-sensitive environments.

The incoming traffic load and with it the computing requirements on network processing nodes such as edge servers can span multiple magnitudes in a matter of milliseconds and less. This makes the task of load balancing and efficient scheduler decisions increasingly difficult, especially considering additional requirements like priority-awareness.

This thesis investigates the critical intersection of Linux scheduling policies and real-time networking performance. The research goals of this thesis include:

• Evaluating the performance implications of different Linux scheduling policies on networking performance
• Analyzing how scheduling decisions affect deterministic behavior in time-sensitive networking applications
• Assessing efficient load balancing mechanisms and the availability of priority-awareness for specific flows
• Identifying and potentially developing SmartNIC extensions to enhance Linux scheduling decisions

Prerequisites