White Papers

Variable versus Fixed-Size Pools for Memory Management in Highly Optimized Protocol Stack Implementations

Abstract— In deeply embedded systems, memory is a precious resource that must be carefully managed. This is particularly the case for protocol stacks of high speed network interface cards where packets passing through the stack need to be efficiently processed. We propose, implement and evaluate an efficient memory pools management scheme fit for embedded processing of high-speed packet-based systems. The implementation is based on structuring a given memory area as a number of small fixed-size partitions where a request for memory allocation is translated into a request for the allocation of a multiple of the fixed-size partitions. We call this a variable-size memory pool system. This is compared with traditional embedded memory management techniques where the memory is structured as a number of fixed-size buffers where an allocation request is assigned a full buffer whether it uses the full buffer or only a small portion of it. The comparison shows that the proposed scheme is far more efficient in terms of multiple performance metrics particularly throughput and memory utilization.

Keywords— Memory Management, Memory Pools, Embedded Systems, Protocol Stacks.

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