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High Precision Latency Forwarding for Wide Area Networks Through Intelligent In-Packet Header Processing (gLBF)

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Abstract

This paper presents guaranteed Latency Based Forwarding (gLBF), a solution that allows for the delivery of packets with end-to-end latency guarantees and that provides per-hop bounded latency with zero jitter. gLBF combines the benefits of earlier algorithms, Urgency-Based Scheduling and Cyclic Queuing and Forwarding, while avoiding their respective downsides. Specifically, gLBF does not need to maintain per-flow state at forwarding devices and does not require strict clock synchronization across the network. As a result, gLBF results in network deployments of significantly reduced complexity and lower cost than previous solutions.

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Code Availability

Per the references, available at https://github.com/network2030/glbf-validation.

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Funding

Performed as part of our work for our employer, Futurewei Technologies (Stewart Bryant was a consultant with Futurewei at the time).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Futurewei Technologies, Inc., 2220 Central Expressway, Santa Clara, CA, 95050, USA

    Toerless Eckert & Alexander Clemm

  2. Institute for Communication Systems, University of Surrey, 7XH, Alexander Fleming Rd, Guildford, UK

    Stewart Bryant

Authors
  1. Toerless Eckert
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  2. Alexander Clemm
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  3. Stewart Bryant
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Contributions

The authors co-wrote the manuscript and jointly developed the concepts. TE was the lead author for most of the sections. AC did an editorial scrub across the paper and contributed several text portions including 2.2.4. and portions of 1, 7. SB contributed section 4.6. Each author reviewed the paper prior to submitting. Test code was developed by TE; test cases were run jointly by TE and AC.

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Correspondence to Toerless Eckert.

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Conflict of interest

The authors declare that they have no competing interest.

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Yes.

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IPR Disclosure

A patent was filed with the USPTO on the gLBF mechanism that is described in the paper.

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Eckert, T., Clemm, A. & Bryant, S. High Precision Latency Forwarding for Wide Area Networks Through Intelligent In-Packet Header Processing (gLBF). J Netw Syst Manage 31, 34 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10922-022-09718-9

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10922-022-09718-9

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