Leveraging Commodity NICs for Accelerating Hierarchical QoS for Broadband Access Networks

Broadband Network Gateways (BNGs) implement Hierarchical QoS (HQoS) to meet subscriber and service-level demands. Software BNGs face scalability challenges due to the large number of queues needed for fine-grained scheduling. We propose a framework that partially offloads HQoS to high-speed NICs, extending DPDK's QoS features. By mapping parts of the HQoS tree to limited amount of hardware queues, we reduce software overhead. Our approach achieves up to 50× reduction in average HQoS processing latency. This enables scalable, low-latency BNGs on commodity hardware.