Designing a Scheduler for Cloud-Based FPGAs

Abstract: The primary focus of this thesis has been to design a network packet scheduler for the 5G (fifth generation) network at Ericsson in Linköping, Sweden. Network packet scheduler manages in which sequences the packages in a network will be transmitted, and will put them in a queue accordingly. Depending on the requirement for the system different packet schedulers will work in different ways. The scheduler that is designed in this thesis has a timing wheel as its core. The packages will be placed in the timing wheel depending on its final transmission time and will be outputted accordingly. The algorithm will be implemented on an FPGA (Field Programmable gate arrays). The FPGA itself is located in a cloud environment. The platform in which the FPGA is located on is called "Amazon EC2 F1", this platform can be rented with a Linux instance which comes with everything that is necessary to develop a synthesized file for the FPGA. Part of the thesis will discuss the design of the algorithm and how it was customized for a hardware implementation and part of the thesis will describe using the instance environment for development.