Network thread scheduling

#This description relates to computer networks.

#Users of computer networks often want a rich variety of network services while also demanding high-speed data access. But network services take processing time that tends to slow the data delivery rate.

#One way to achieve both high-speed and high-performance data packet processing is through parallelism or multi-threading in which network devices execute more than one thread simultaneously. Multi-threading is useful when a single task takes so long to complete that processing packets serially would slow down the overall packet throughput of a system too much.

#FIG. 1 is a flow chart of a basic thread routing mechanism.

#FIG. 2 is a flow chart of a thread routing mechanism with a series of network tasks.

#FIG. 3 is a flow chart of another thread routing mechanism.

#A basic mechanism for avoiding per-host packet reordering in a multi-threaded system ensures that packets en route to or from the same host will not be reordered even in the presence of semi-random (or even random) per-thread and per-task completion times.

#As shown in FIG. 1, in some implementations, a number of hosts 10 provide a stream of data packets, P1, P2, P3, P4, to a network. A number of tasks, 40, 50, including a multi-threaded task, 60-63, are performed on the data packets within a network device 70 as they travel across the network. Eventually, the data packets are delivered to their respective destination end hosts 80.

#Referring again to FIG. 1, in a basic mechanism to avoid reordering of packets destined for a host, a first function 40 identifies a characteristic about each packet and a second function 50 routes all packets having the given characteristic to the same thread 60, 61, 62, 63. This ensures that packets having the given characteristic will be processed serially by the same thread and thus remain in order with respect to one another.