There are applications which MUST have reliable communication otherwise things fall apart! Think industrial automation, robotics, aerospace, automotive... Failure in timeliness of message delivery could be catastrophic. Typically when such a network is built, the operator makes sure that any congestion-related issues and packet losses are avoided. However, Murphy's law applies: the wiring may break, a radio link can be temporarily shielded by an obstacle, or worse the network nodes can be damaged... To deal with such losses, industry standardization has been introduced to provide per-packet service protection - these include Frame Replication and Elimination for Reliability(FRER) for Layer 2 Ethernet networks and the Packet Replication, Elimination, and OrderingFunctions(PREOF) forLayer3 IP/MPLS networks.

Ferenc Fejes et al have implemented FRER in two different approaches: 1) in eBPF/XDP as a lightweight software implementation; and (2) in userspace using PF_PACKET. Ferenc et al will go over the architecture details of the two approaches and then evaluate XDP FRER via an experimental analysis and further compare the two FRER implementations.

cheers, jamal

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