US 8,787,255 B2Granted

Method and system for improved multi-cell support on a single modem board

AssigneeAlcatel Lucent

InventorsMohammad R. Khawer, Mugur Abulius

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Abstract

A system for providing multi-cell support within a single SMP partition in a telecommunications network is disclosed. The typically includes a modem board and a multi-core processor having a plurality of processor cores, wherein the multi-core processor is configured to disable non-essential interrupts arriving on a plurality of data plane cores and route the non-essential interrupts to a plurality of control plane cores. Optionally, the multi-core processor may be configured so that all non-real-time threads and processes are bound to processor cores that are dedicated for all control plane activities and processor cores that are dedicated for all data plane activities will not host or run any threads that are not directly needed for data path implementation or Layer 2 processing.

Claims17

Dependent claims

A computer-implemented method of processing data packets in a wireless network with a multi-core processor on a modem board, the method comprising:

while running a queue manager in polling mode, acquiring a buffer for an incoming data packet and enqueuing the data packet onto a frame queue, wherein the frame queue comprises a linked list of frame descriptors to be handled by the queue manager;
using a kernel thread to periodically poll the queue manager for queued up frame descriptors;
dequeuing N frame descriptors from the hardware component, where N is a tunable parameter;
executing a callback function associated with each dequeued frame descriptor in kernel space, wherein the callback function enqueues a buffer pointer of the data packet within the frame descriptor into a kernel-to-user mapped ring of buffer descriptors for processing;
and
delivering the data packet to a messaging module without a context switch, wherein the multi-core processor includes one or more data plane cores that are configured to run data plane functions and one or more control plane cores that are configured to run control plane functions and further comprising disabling non-essential interrupts received on the data plane cores and routing the non-essential interrupts to one or more of the control plane cores.

3 more elements

A system for processing data packets in a wireless network, the system comprising:

a modem board;
a multi-core processor comprising a plurality of processor cores attached to the modem board, wherein the modem board comprises kernel space and user space, and wherein one or more of the processor cores are configured to run data plane functions and one or more of the processor cores are configured to run control plane functions and the multi-core processor is configured to disable non-essential interrupts received on the data plane cores and route the non-essential interrupts to one or more of the control plane cores;
a queue manager that is configured to manage queues and run in polling mode;
a frame manager that is configured to acquire a buffer for an incoming data packet and enqueue the data packet onto a frame queue, wherein the frame queue comprises a linked list of frame descriptors to be handled by the hardware component;
a kernel thread that is configured to periodically poll the queue manager for queued up frame descriptors and dequeue N frame descriptors from the hardware component, where N is a tunable parameter;
and
a callback function associated with each dequeued frame descriptor in kernel space that is configured to enqueue a buffer pointer of the data packet within the frame descriptor into a kernel-to-user mapped ring of buffer descriptors for processing
and to deliver the data packet to a messaging module without a context switch.

5 more elements

Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.