Octopus: A Fair Packet Delivery Service

The packet delivery fairness is critical in many applications in the cloud, such as exchange systems, consensus protocols, and online gaming applications. However, due to nonidentical and dynamic packet forwarding paths, as well as many in-network queuing delays, supporting packet delivery fairness is challenging in a shared compute environment. In this paper, we present Octopus, the first general fair packet delivery service to achieve packet arrival time variations smaller than tens of nanoseconds, with the existence of latency variations in the network. The key ideas of Octopus to support such good fairness come from repurposing hardware traffic shaping capabilities in modern NICs, and deploying agents at local SmartNICs to minimize latency variations from packet forwarding. Evaluation results show that Octopus has less than 40 ns unfairness for up to 99.97% multicast packets.