Experimental study of router buffer sizing

Neda Beheshti, Yashar Ganjali, Monia Ghobadi, Nick McKeown, Geoff Salmon
2008 Proceedings of the 8th ACM SIGCOMM conference on Internet measurement conference - IMC '08  
During the past four years, several papers have proposed rules for sizing buffers in Internet core routers. Appenzeller et al. suggest that a link needs a buffer of size Ç( where is the capacity of the link, and AE is the number of flows sharing the link. If correct, buffers could be reduced by 99% in a typical backbone router today without loss in throughput. Enachecsu et al., and Raina et al. suggest that buffers can be reduced even further to 20-50 packets if we are willing to sacrifice a
more » ... ction of link capacities, and if there is a large ratio between the speed of core and access links. If correct, this is a five orders of magnitude reduction in buffer sizes. Each proposal is based on theoretical analysis and validated using simulations. Given the potential benefits (and the risk of getting it wrong!) it is worth asking if these results hold in real operational networks. In this paper, we report buffer-sizing experiments performed on real networks -either laboratory networks with commercial routers as well as customized switching and monitoring equipment (UW Madison, Sprint ATL, and University of Toronto), or operational backbone networks (Level 3 Communications backbone network, Internet2, and Stanford). The good news: Subject to the limited scenarios we can create, the buffer sizing results appear to hold. While we are confident that the Ç( Ô AE) will hold quite generally for backbone routers, the 20-50 packet rule should be ap-£
doi:10.1145/1452520.1452545 dblp:conf/imc/BeheshtiGGMS08 fatcat:iqs2xkif6bckdpfnxcdlhtnm3y