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Falcon: A Reliable, Low Latency Hardware Transport#

SIGCOMM 2025 digest Program Core pick Coimbra · 8–11 September 2025

Abstract Paper Recording

Arjun Singhvi, Nandita Dukkipati et al. (Google, with Meta/Nvidia/Microsoft)

Play the recording: Falcon: A Reliable, Low Latency Hardware Transport

Why: RoCE's PFC/special-fabric dependence limits where hardware transport can go; a multi-vendor general-purpose alternative is strategically significant for DC NIC direction.

What: The first hardware transport supporting multiple Upper Layer Protocols and heterogeneous workloads on lossy, general-purpose Ethernet without special switch support.

How: Delay-based congestion control with multipath load balancing, a layered request-response transaction interface for multi-ULP support, hardware retransmission/error handling, and a programmable engine; first implementation hits 200 Gbps / 120 Mops/sec with op-completion up to 8x lower than CX-7 RoCE under congestion.

Where applicable: Broad ambition (general Ethernet DC), but it's hardware transport — realization depends on NIC silicon adoption; the cross-vendor authorship is itself the signal.