Packet Processing Circuitry for Redundant Stream Deduplication
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Solution Overview
Problem
High-speed packet streaming schemes for real-time video transmission across networks often require redundant streams, leading to increased memory footprint and processing burden on the host processor, as there is no guarantee that all packets will reach the destination in order, necessitating reordering and interleaving at the receiver.
Innovation Solution
A communication apparatus and method that uses a network interface controller to receive and process redundant packet streams, mapping packet sequence numbers to buffer addresses to eliminate redundant data, ensuring only one copy of each slice is stored in order, thereby reducing the processing load and memory footprint of the host processor.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Reliability
If redundant packet streams are transmitted to ensure data availability, then reliability is improved, but memory footprint and processing burden increase
Solution Approach 1:
The patent extracts the packet reordering and deduplication function from the host processor software and implements it in the network interface controller hardware. The NIC maintains a reordering buffer and uses packet sequence numbers to automatically reorder packets and eliminate duplicates before passing data to the host, thereby reducing the processing burden on the host while maintaining reliability through redundant streams
Solution Approach 2:
The network interface controller acts as an intermediary between the network and the host processor. It receives redundant packet streams, performs reordering and deduplication operations in its buffer, and presents a single ordered data stream to the host, thereby shielding the host from the complexity of handling multiple redundant streams while ensuring data availability
2Reliability
If packets are reordered and interleaved at the destination to reconstruct data, then data reconstruction reliability is improved, but latency increases
Solution Approach 1:
The network interface controller performs packet reordering and deduplication operations in advance, before data is passed to the host processor. By maintaining a reordering buffer and using sequence numbers to preemptively organize packets in the correct order, the NIC eliminates latency that would otherwise occur during software-based reordering at the host
3Reliability
If multiple redundant streams are processed in parallel, then data availability is improved, but host processor load increases
Solution Approach 1:
The patent extracts the parallel stream processing function from the host processor and implements it in the network interface controller hardware. The NIC receives multiple redundant streams, processes them through its reordering buffer, and outputs a single consolidated stream, thereby preserving data availability while eliminating the processing load from the host processor
Data Source
AI summary
Communication apparatus includes a host interface and a network interface, which receives from a packet communication network at least one packet stream including a sequence of data packets, which include headers containing respective sequence numbers and data payloads containing slices of the data segment having a predefined, fixed size per slice. Packet processing circuitry is configured to receive the data packets from the network interface, and to map the data payloads of the data packets in the at least one packet stream, using a linear mapping of the sequence numbers, to respective addresses in the buffer.