libpcap inter-arrival times and scheduler

Question

I am doing research about network traffic characterization. While processing collected data (captured by tcpdump and saved to a database), I stumbled over the weird phenomenon with packet (or flow) inter-arrival times:

Inter-arrival times of 35-170µsec are never observed

Of course, without a DAG card (which would do hardware time stamping of the packets), I can't rely on a precision in dimensions below msec. Nevertheless I'm searching for a reason, why this gaps exists in the following cumulative distribution function:

I've also plotted the number of flows seen with a specific IAT:

My data basis contains >13 Mio flows, so it's very unlikely that this gap exists by accident - I'm only searching for the reason.

Has it sth. to do with scheduling? I know the linux kernel scheduler (was a debian machine) uses a frequency of 250Hz, thus each tick is 4ms, which is bigger than my gap of 35-170µsec by factor >200. Is there any kind of scheduling done by the network card? There are many IATs of 0µsec seen, so I assume these packets are processed directly after each other. I can imagine that the kind of scheduler tick I'm searching for is about 40µsec, resulting in IATs of 0<x<40µsec and afterwards other things than my capturing is done (for 120µsec = 3ticks) and I get only ticks >120µsec.

Do you have a clue, how I could explain this gap? Thanks a lot! Steffen

Answer 1

Not sure really, but I could imagine the card doing some kind of book-keeping itself with a certain tick rate. Also, how does the range 35-170 µs relate to a packet length?

Answer 2

This is just a hypothesis (aka WAG), but perhaps 170us is the minimum time between consecutive interrupts from the NIC (either due to the NIC hardware, the DMA controller, the interrupt controller, the CPU or some combination of all these).

The packets with inter-arrival times of <35us would correspond to multiple packets received in the one interrupt (with different processing times, depending on size and protocol). 35us itself would correspond to the maximum number of packets that can be received in one interrupt (due to the size of the NIC buffers), with the worst-case processing times.