Competitive FIFO Buffer Management for Weighted Packets

Motivated by providing differentiated services on the Internet, we consider efficient online algorithms for buffer management in network switches. We study a FIFO buffering model, in which unit-length packets arrive in an online manner and each packet is associated with a value (weight) representing its priority. The order of the packets being sent should comply with the order of their arriving time. The buffer size is finite. At most one packet can be sent in each time step. Our objective is to maximize weighted throughput, defined by the total value of the packets sent. In this paper, we design competitive online FIFO buffering algorithms, where competitive ratios are used to measure online algorithms' performance against the worst-case scenarios. We first provide an online algorithm with a constant competitive ratio 2. Then, we study the experimental performance of our algorithm on real Internet packet traces and compare it with all other known FIFO online competitive algorithms. We conclude that for the same instance, the algorithms' experimental performances could be different from their competitive ratios; other factors such as packet flow characteristics and buffer sizes affect the outcome. Our algorithm outperforms other online algorithms when the buffer resource is limited.

[1]  Allan Borodin,et al.  Online computation and competitive analysis , 1998 .

[2]  Yishay Mansour,et al.  Competitive queue policies for differentiated services , 2000, Proceedings IEEE INFOCOM 2000. Conference on Computer Communications. Nineteenth Annual Joint Conference of the IEEE Computer and Communications Societies (Cat. No.00CH37064).

[3]  Nicolas Christin,et al.  A QoS architecture for quantitative service differentiation , 2003, IEEE Commun. Mag..

[4]  Konstantinos Psounis,et al.  CHOKe - a stateless active queue management scheme for approximating fair bandwidth allocation , 2000, Proceedings IEEE INFOCOM 2000. Conference on Computer Communications. Nineteenth Annual Joint Conference of the IEEE Computer and Communications Societies (Cat. No.00CH37064).

[5]  Donald F. Towsley,et al.  On achievable service differentiation with token bucket marking for TCP , 2000, SIGMETRICS '00.

[6]  Boaz Patt-Shamir,et al.  Optimal smoothing schedules for real-time streams (extended abstract) , 2000, PODC.

[7]  Matthias Englert,et al.  Lower and Upper Bounds on FIFO Buffer Management in QoS Switches , 2006, ESA.

[8]  Fei Li.  Fairness Analysis in Competitive FIFO Buffer Management , 2008, 2008 IEEE International Performance, Computing and Communications Conference.

[9]  Walter Willinger,et al.  On the self-similar nature of Ethernet traffic , 1993, SIGCOMM '93.

[10]  Roch Guérin,et al.  A simple FIFO-based scheme for differentiated loss guarantees , 2007, Comput. Networks.

[11]  Boaz Patt-Shamir,et al.  Buffer Overflow Management in QoS Switches , 2004, SIAM J. Comput..

[12]  Yishay Mansour,et al.  Competitive queueing policies for QoS switches , 2003, SODA '03.

[13]  Roch Guérin,et al.  Quality-of-Service in Packet Networks: Basic Mechanisms and Directions , 1999, Comput. Networks.

[14]  Vasilios A. Siris,et al.  Adaptive packet marking for achieving fairness in DiffServ networks , 2005, Comput. Commun..

[15]  Fouad A. Tobagi,et al.  On traffic types and service classes in the Internet , 2000, Globecom '00 - IEEE. Global Telecommunications Conference. Conference Record (Cat. No.00CH37137).

[16]  Yishay Mansour,et al.  Improved Competitive Guarantees for QoS Buffering , 2003, Algorithmica.

[17]  Sally Floyd,et al.  Wide area traffic: the failure of Poisson modeling , 1995, TNET.

[18]  Boaz Patt-Shamir,et al.  Optimal smoothing schedules for real-time streams , 2004, PODC '00.

[19]  V. Paxson,et al.  WHERE MATHEMATICS MEETS THE INTERNET , 1998 .

[20]  Parameswaran Ramanathan,et al.  Proportional differentiated services: delay differentiation and packet scheduling , 2002, TNET.

[21]  E.L. Lawler,et al.  Optimization and Approximation in Deterministic Sequencing and Scheduling: a Survey , 1977 .

[22]  Allan Borodin,et al.  Adversarial queueing theory , 1996, STOC '96.

[23]  Murad S. Taqqu,et al.  On the Self-Similar Nature of Ethernet Traffic , 1993, SIGCOMM.

[24]  Boaz Patt-Shamir,et al.  Nearly optimal FIFO buffer management for DiffServ , 2002, PODC '02.

[25]  Baruch Schieber,et al.  Further Improvements in Competitive Guarantees for QoS Buffering , 2004, ICALP.

[26]  Shin-ichi Tadaki.  Long-Term Power-Law Fluctuation in Internet Traffic(General) , 2007 .