Priority-Based Network Interrupt Scheduling for Predictable Real-Time Support

Interrupt handling is generally separated from process scheduling. This can lead to a scheduling anomaly and priority inversion. The processor can interrupt a higher priority process that is currently executing, in order to handle a network packet reception interruption on behalf of its intended lower priority receiver process. We propose a new network interrupt handling scheme that combines interrupt handling with process scheduling and the priority of the process. The proposed scheme employs techniques to identify the intended receiver process of an incoming packet at an earlier phase. We implement a prototype system of the proposed scheme on Linux 2.6, and our experiment results show that the prototype system supports the predictable real-time behavior of higher priority processes even when excessive traffic is sent to lower priority processes.