HPQ: a high capacity hybrid priority queue architecture for high-speed network switches

This paper presents a fast hybrid priority queue architecture usable in todays high-speed networking devices. This architecture can be used for scheduling and prioritizing packets in the network data plane. Due to increasing traffic, a high capacity priority queue, with constant latency and guaranteed performance is highly needed. In this work, an important goal is to reduce latency to best support the upcoming 5G wireless standards. The proposed hybrid priority queue architecture enables pipelined en/dequeue operations with O(1) time complexity. The proposed architecture is implemented in C++ and is synthesized with the Vivado High-Level Synthesis tool. The reported results show the feasibility of the proposed solutions and are compared across a range of priority queue depths and performance metrics with existing approaches. An implementation of the proposed architecture on a ZC706 FPGA board works at 60 MHz and supports links operating at 10 Gb/s, with a total capacity of ½ million packet tags spread over 512 independent queues.