Quality-of-service-aware adaptation scheme for multi-core protocol processing architecture

Employing adaptable protocol processing architectures has shown a high potential in provisioning Quality-of-Service (QoS) while retaining efficient use of available energy budget. Nevertheless, successful QoS provisioning using adaptable protocol processing architectures requires adaption to be agile and to have low latency. That is, a long adaptation latency might lead to violating desired packet processing latency, desired throughput or loss of packets if the memory fails to accommodate packet accumulation. This paper presents an elastic management scheme to permit agile and QoS-aware adaptation of processing elements (PEs) within the protocol processing architecture, such that desired QoS is maintained. Moreover, our proposed scheme has the potential to reduce energy consumption since it employs the PEs upon demand. We quantify the latency required for PEs adaptation, the reduction in energy and the reduction in area that can be achieved using our scheme. We also consider two different real-life use cases to demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed management scheme in maintaining QoS while conserving available energy.