Coalescing interrupts based on fragment information in packets and a network controller for coalescing

A network controller comprising:

• a receiver interface configured to receive a packet transmitted from a remote device over a communication network;
• a fragment detector configured with circuitry to detect one or more fragments in a field of the packet, wherein the field is associated with a session layer or higher abstraction layer of an open systems interconnect (OSI) model;
• and
• an interrupt coalescing engine configured with circuitry to extract fragment information from the packet which indicates one or more of a last fragment index associated with a last fragment of one or more fragment in the packet and a fragment count indicative of a number of fragments associated with a message which is fragmented;
• and coalesce interrupts associated with the packet with other interrupts associated with other packets based on one or more of the last fragment index and the fragment count.