An On-Demand Queue Management Architecture for a Programmable Traffic Manager

A queue manager (QM) is a core traffic management (TM) function used to provide per-flow queuing in access and metro networks; however current designs have limited scalability. An on-demand QM (OD-QM) which is part of a new modular field-programmable gate-array (FPGA)-based TM is presented that dynamically maps active flows to the available physical resources; its scalability is derived from exploiting the observation that there are only a few hundred active flows in a high speed network. Simulations with real traffic show that it is a scalable, cost-effective approach that enhances per-flow queuing performance, thereby allowing per-flow QM without the need for extra external memory at speeds up to 10 Gbps. It utilizes 2.3%-16.3% of a Xilinx XC5VSX50t FPGA and works at 111 MHz.