A Grouped Sorting Queue Supporting Dynamic Updates for Timer Management in High-Speed Network Interface Cards

With the hardware offloading of network functions, network interface cards (NICs) undertake massive stateful, high-precision, and high-throughput tasks, where timers serve as a critical enabling component. However, existing timer management schemes suffer from heavy software load, low precision, lack of hardware update support, and overflow. This paper proposes two novel operations for priority queues--update and group sorting--to enable hardware timer management. To the best of our knowledge, this work presents the first hardware priority queue to support an update operation through the composition and propagation of basic operations to modify the priorities of elements within the queue. The group sorting mechanism ensures correct timing behavior post-overflow by establishing a group boundary priority to alter the sorting process and element insertion positions. Implemented with a hybrid architecture of a one-dimension (1D) systolic array and shift registers, our design is validated through packet-level simulations for flow table timeout management. Results demonstrate that a 4K-depth, 16-bit timer queue achieves over 500 MHz (175 Mpps, 12 ns precision) in a 28nm process and over 300 MHz (116 Mpps) on an FPGA. Critically, it reduces LUTs and FFs usage by 31% and 25%, respectively, compared to existing designs.