A packet property-based task scheduling policy for control plane OS in NP-based applications

In NP-based networking elements, there are various kinds of packet traffic between data plane and control plane, which have different priorities and are handled by different tasks running on control plane OS. The critical packets need to be processed in time, otherwise the system, even the network, may enter some unstable states. Thus, the packets should be processed according to their priorities, i.e., packet-processing tasks for more important packets should be executed sooner if they are both in ready state. From the perspective of control plane OS design, packet-processing tasks should be scheduled based on some properties of packets waiting to be processed. This paper proposes a packet property-based task scheduling policy to alleviate the problem. The design and implementation are described and the performance results are discussed. The results show that this scheduling policy can achieve our design goal properly.