A Method of FIFO Tag Switching in a Multi-core Packet Processing Apparatus

摘要

Processing a stream of packets using a multi-core processor with a packet order enforcement (POE) module. Each core issues a Get_ packet command to the POE module which selects, such as by strict priority or weighted round robin, packets to be processed by each core. Each core retrieves and processes the packet. Once processing is completed each cores will issue a tag switch command to the POE module and then execute other service procedures. The POE module performs the tag switching commands sent by each core in First-In First-Out (FIFO) order such that only tag switch commands for the packet at the head of the queue are performed (at time T6) others are held pending. Once tag switching has been performed the method repeats for processing in subsequent cores until all processing for the packet is completed wherein the packet is output and the tag may be deleted.