Performance and fluid simulations of a novel shared buffer management system

We consider a switching system which has multiple ports that share a common buffer, in which there is a FIFO logical queue for each port. Each port may support a large number of flows or connections, which are approximately homogeneous in their statistical characteristics, with common QoS requirements in cell loss and maximum delay. Heterogeneity may exist across ports. Our first contribution is a buffer management scheme based on buffer admission control, which is integrated with connection admission control at the switch, and is at the same time fair, efficient and robust in sharing the buffer resources across ports. Our scheme is based on the resource-sharing technique of virtual partitioning. Our second major contribution is to advance the practice of discrete-event fluid simulations. Such simulations are approximations to cell-level simulations and offer orders of magnitude speed-up. A third contribution of the paper is the formulation and solution of a problem of optimal allocation of bandwidth and buffers to each port having specific delay bounds, in a lossless multiplexing framework. Finally, we report on extensive simulation results. The scheme is found to be effective, efficient and robust.