Lightweight Real-Time Network Communication Protocol for Commodity Cluster Systems

Lightweight real-time network communication is crucial for commodity cluster systems and embedded control systems. This paper introduces the design, implementation and evaluation of SS-RTUDP, a novel zero-copy data path based real-time communication protocol with efficient communication resources management. To avoid unpredictable overheads during SS-RTUDP packets transmission, all communication resources are preallocated. A feasible fragmentation mechanism is also proposed for transmitting SS-RTUDP packets larger than the network MTU. On the other hand, the additional real-time traffic smoother provides high priorities to SS-RTUDP packets and also smoothes peak packets arrival curve. The prototype of SSRTUDP is implemented under Linux systems and performance evaluations over Fast/Gigabit Ethernet are provided. The measurement results prove that SSRTUDP can provide not only much lower latency and higher communication bandwidth than traditional UDP protocol, but also good real-time network communication performance for commodity cluster systems.