Consider for example the following functions that need to be done in the typical transmit lifecycle of a packet received on the ethernet interface that is supposed to go out on a WiFi interface:
- Ethernet receive handling
- Basic ethernet classification and fowarding
- Stripping of headers
- Attaching LLC headers
- Attaching WiFi headers
- Queening frames for transmission
- DMA'ing frames
- Scheduling frames for transmission
- Aggregation at different layers
- Encryption
These are some of the high-level things that need to be done with frame transmissions. There might be other things depending on the features enabled on the transmit path. How and where each of these are done could be dependent on the load on the system for different components. So, based on given constraints and capacities it is possible to re-configure different hardware components to work on different software tasks.
Patent abstract:
This patent is described for dynamically assigning tasks to entities of different types within a network system based on preferences to perform the tasks on particular entities and/or network/device conditions. This ability to dynamically assign processing of tasks between disparate devices in a network system provides a more efficient network configuration and utilization of resources while not compromising throughput, overall network security, and/or network flexibility.
Bibtex Citation information:
@misc{bhanage2016method,
title={Method for dynamic load balancing in campus deployments},
author={Bhanage, G.D. and Kannan, V. and Narasimhan, P.},
url={https://www.google.com/patents/US9405591},
year={2016},
month=aug # "~2",
publisher={Google Patents},
note={US Patent 9,405,591}
}
