Some embodiments provide a network forwarding integrated circuit (IC) that includes at least one packet processing pipeline. The packet processing pipeline includes multiple match-action stages, at least one of which includes a stateful processing unit that operates at a line rate of the network forwarding IC. The stateful processing unit is configured to receive data stored in a memory location associated with a stateful table of the match-action stage. The data includes a set of values. The stateful processing unit is further configured to identify one of a maximum value and a minimum value from the set of values, and to output the identified value for use by a next match-action stage.

Some embodiments provide a network forwarding integrated circuit (IC) that includes at least one packet processing pipeline. The packet processing pipeline includes multiple match-action stages, at least one of which includes a stateful processing unit that operates at a line rate of the network forwarding IC. The stateful processing unit is configured to receive data stored in a memory location associated with a stateful table of the match-action stage. The data includes a set of values. The stateful processing unit is further configured to identify one of a maximum value and a minimum value from the set of values, and to output the identified value for use by a next match-action stage.

A method for dividing communication services in smart substation into different priorities, the method including: determining the priority of a message to be sent according to the service type and its priority definition; the communication services includes trip message, state change message, sampled value message, device status message, time synchronization message, and file transfer message; the corresponding priority is respectively defined as 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 1; and filling the user priority field of IEEE802.1Q label in a message header with a binary value corresponding to its priority.

A communication method in a communication network comprising a plurality of nodes, at least one node comprising a plurality of traffic queues for serving data traffic at different priorities, each traffic queue being associated with a respective queue backoff value computed from respective queue contention parameters having first and second values in, respectively, a first and a second contention modes, obtaining quality of service requirements of data stored in a traffic queue of the node; checking whether the quality of service requirements can be fulfilled when accessing the communication channel using the second contention mode; if the requirements cannot be fulfilled as the result of the checking, disabling access to resource units provided by the other node within one or more transmission opportunities granted to the other node on the communication channel; and transmitting data stored in the traffic queue using the first contention mode.

A quality of service management system includes a rules engine that receives information associated with a communication path having an assigned quality of service (QoS) to be provided for a customer communication device, and identifies one or more network elements assigned to provide the communication path. Each network element having a plurality of queues configured to provide varying QoS levels relative to one another. For each of the network elements, the rules engine determines at least one queue that is configured to provide the communication path at the assigned quality of service, and transmits queue information associated with the determined queue to its respective network element, the network element conveying the communication path through the determined queue.

Various methods and systems for implementing request scheduling and processing in a multi-tenant distributed computing environment are provided. Requests to utilize system resources in the distributed computing environment are stored in account queues corresponding to tenant accounts. If storing a request in an account queue would exceed a throttling threshold such as a limit on the number of requests stored per account, the request is dropped to a throttling queue. A scheduler prioritizes processing requests stored in the processing queue before processing requests stored in the account queues. The account queues can be drained using dominant resource scheduling. In some embodiments, a request is not picked up from an account queue if processing the request would exceed a predefined hard limit on system resource utilization for the corresponding tenant account. In some embodiments, the hard limit is defined as a percentage of threads the system has to process requests.

Methods, apparatus and articles of manufacture for advertising network layer reachability information specifying a quality of service for an identified network flow are disclosed. Example methods disclosed herein to specify quality of service for network flows include receiving network layer reachability information including a first quality of service class specified for a first network flow, the network layer reachability information having been advertised by a first network element that is to receive the first network flow. Such example methods can also include updating an incoming packet determined to belong to the first network flow to indicate that the incoming packet belongs to the first quality of service class, the incoming packet being received from a second network element. Such example methods can further include, after updating the incoming packet, routing the incoming packet towards the first network element.

A communication method includes generating a physical layer protocol data unit (PPDU) including a preamble, where the preamble includes a legacy physical layer preamble and a new physical layer preamble, wherein the new physical layer preamble includes a repeated field that has a preset out-of-order relationship with a preset field of the legacy physical layer preamble in frequency domain. The communication method further includes sending the PPDU.

A communication control device stores reception data received from a network in any one of a plurality of reception queues to which different priorities have been given in advance to transfer the reception data to a main memory. The communication control device includes a reference table and a selection unit. In the reference table, at least one of a source address, a destination address, and an Ethernet frame type of the reception data to be stored is defined for at least one of the plurality of reception queues. The selection unit selects a reception queue in which the reception data is to be stored with reference to the reference table using at least one of the source address, the destination address, and the Ethernet frame type of the reception data.

Methods, apparatus, systems, and articles of manufacture are disclosed for dynamic load balancing for multi-core computing environments. An example apparatus includes a first and a plurality of second cores of a processor, and circuitry in a die of the processor separate from the first and the second cores, the circuitry to enqueue identifiers in one or more queues in the circuitry associated with respective ones of data packets of a packet flow, allocate one or more of the second cores to dequeue first ones of the identifiers in response to a throughput parameter of the first core not satisfying a throughput threshold to cause the one or more of the second cores to execute one or more operations on first ones of the data packets, and provide the first ones to one or more data consumers to distribute the first data packets.