A programmable buffer management platform

IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, 2020

Buffering architectures and policies for their efficient management are core ingredients of a network architecture. However, despite strong incentives to experiment with and deploy new policies, opportunities for changing anything beyond minor elements are limited. We introduce a new specification language, OpenQueue, that allows to express virtual buffering architectures and management policies representing a wide variety of economic models. OpenQueue allows users to specify entire buffering architectures and policies conveniently through several comparators and simple functions. We show examples of buffer management policies in OpenQueue and empirically demonstrate its impact on performance in various settings.

Proceedings of the 2016 Symposium on Architectures for Networking and Communications Systems - ANCS '16, 2016

Buffering architectures and policies for their efficient management constitute one of the core ingredients of a network architecture. In this work we introduce a new specification language, BASEL, that allows to express virtual buffering architectures and management policies representing a variety of economic models. BASEL does not require the user to implement policies in a high-level language; rather, the entire buffering architecture and its policy are reduced to several comparators and simple functions. We show examples of buffer management policies in BASEL and demonstrate empirically the impact of various settings on performance.

1998

As the cost of computing power decreases and network traffic patterns become more complex,it becomes worthwhile to consider the benefits of allowing users to specify policies for managingtheir traffic within the network. Active networking is a new design paradigm in which thenetwork is architected not merely to forward packets, but also to be dynamically programmedin order to support per-user services.

International Journal of …, 2007

2007

As the Internet becomes more mature, there is a realization that improving the performance of routers has the potential to substantially improve Internet performance in general. Currently, most routers forward packets in a First-In-First-Out (FIFO) order. However, the diversity of applications supported by modern IP-based networks has resulted in unpredictable packet flows, and heterogeneous network traffic. Thus, it is becoming more reasonable to consider differentiating between different types of packets, and perhaps to consider allowing packets to specify a deadline by which it must be processed. These issues have made buffer management at routers a critical issue in providing effective quality of service to the various applications that use the network. In this paper, we study an online problem in which each packet is described by its discrete arrival time, non-negative weight and discrete deadline; arriving packets are buffered for delivery and all packets have the same process...

2007 International Symposium on Integrated Circuits, 2007

The steady increase of processing requirements in today's networks has led to the introduction of network processors (NPs) as a new class of application-specific integrated circuits. NPs are multiprocessor devices specialized for delivering both high packet processing performance and programming flexibility. Their throughput depends not only on the processing resources but also on the memory subsystem performance, since supporting elevated line speeds typically requires an excessive amount of data transfers to and from the memory.

2001

IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications, 1999

Recently, there has been much interest in using active queue management in routers in order to protect users from connections that are not very responsive to congestion notification. A recent Internet draft recommends schemes based on random early detection for achieving these goals, to the extent that it is possible, in a system without "per-flow" state. However, a "stateless" system with first-in/first-out (FIFO) queueing is very much handicapped in the degree to which flow isolation and fairness can be achieved. Starting with the observation that a "stateless" system is but one extreme in a spectrum of design choices and that per-flow queueing for a large number of flows is possible, we present active queue management mechanisms that are tailored to provide a high degree of isolation and fairness for TCP connections in a gigabit IP router using per-flow queueing. We show that IP flow state in a router can be bounded if the scheduling discipline used has finite memory, and we investigate the performance implications of different buffer management strategies in such a system. We show that merely using perflow scheduling is not sufficient to achieve effective isolation and fairness, and it must be combined with appropriate buffer management strategies.

2016

This paper studies the use of Palermo receiver side congestion control as an alternative to Active Queue Management (AQM) for end users needing to improve latency and fair sharing in their incoming traffic. Because of the end users lacking administrative access to ISP devices in order to tune their incoming bottleneck queue, this alternative results in a valid option to increase perfor-

Proceedings. IEEE INFOCOM '98, the Conference on Computer Communications. Seventeenth Annual Joint Conference of the IEEE Computer and Communications Societies. Gateway to the 21st Century (Cat. No.98CH36169)