METHOD FOR TRAFFIC SCHEDULING IN INTELLIGENT NETWORK INTERFACE CIRCUITRY

A method of operating intelligent network interface circuitry facilitates the tunneling of packets between at least one process, executing on a host computer, and a peer via a network, via the network interface circuitry. Packets are received from the process executing on the host computer. Modulation event tokens are managed, including receiving and providing modulation event tokens. Modulation events are processed. It is decided whether to transmit the received packets out to the network in association with modulation event processing, and the received packets are transmitted out to the network based on the deciding step. Based on a result of the modulation events processing step, modulation event tokens are caused to be fed back for receipt by the modulation event tokens managing step. As a result, the packets are tunneled through the network interface circuitry and the transmission of the packets is modulated out to the network.