Flit Scheduling for Cut-through Switching: Towards Near-Zero End-to-end Latency

Achieving low end-to-end latency with high reliability is one of the key objectives for future mission-critical applications, like the Tactile Internet and real-time interactive Virtual/Augmented Reality (VR/AR). To serve the purpose, cut-through (CT) switching is a promising approach to significantly reduce the transmission delay of store-and-forward switching, via flit-ization of a packet and concurrent forwarding of the flits belonging to the same packet. CT switching, however, has been applied only to well-controlled scenarios like network-on-chip and data center networks, and hence flit scheduling in heterogeneous environments (e.g., the Internet and wide area network) has been given little attention. This paper tries to fill the gap to facilitate the adoption of CT switching in the general-purpose data networks. In particular, we first introduce a packet discarding technique that sheds the packet expected to violate its delay requirement and then propose two flit scheduling algorithms, f EDF (flit-based Earliest Deadline First) and f SPF (flit-based Shortest Processing-time First), aiming at enhancing both reliability and end-to-end latency. Considering packet delivery ratio (PDR) as a reliability metric, we performed extensive simulations to show that the proposed scheduling algorithms can enhance PDR by up to 30.11% (when the delay requirement is 7 ms) and the average end-to-end latency by up to 13.86% (when the delay requirement is 10 ms), against first-in first-out (FIFO) scheduling.