Just-In-Time Networking Framework on System-on-Chip (SoC) platform

Overview

This project puts forth a networking paradigm, referred to as just-in-time (JIT) communication, to support client-server applications with stringent request-response latency requirement. Of interest is not just the round-trip delay of the network, but the actual request-response latency experienced by the application. The JIT framework contains two salient features as described in the following.

• At the client side, the communication layer will “pull” a request from the client just when there is an upcoming transmission opportunity from the network. This ensures that the request contains information that is as fresh as possible (e.g., a sensor reading obtained just before the transmission opportunity).
• At the server side, the network ascertains that the server, after receiving and processing the request to generate a response (e.g., a control command to be sent to the client), will have a transmission opportunity at just this time.

We realize the JIT system, including the protocol stack, over a Time-Division-Multiple-Access (TDMA) network implemented on a System-on-Chip (SoC) platform. We prove that a TDMA network with a power-of-2 time slots per superframe is optimal for realizing the server-side JIT function. Our experimental results validate that JIT networks can yield significantly lower request-response latency than networks without JIT support can.

Publications

L. Zhang, S. C. Liew, H. Chen 
A Just-In-Time Networking Framework for Minimizing Request-Response Latency of Wireless Time-Sensitive Applications
arXiv:2109.03032 [cs.NI], Sep. 2021