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Performance simulation of buffer bloat in routers

Bert Gijsbers, Deepthi Devaki Akkoorath

Project Report

The Netherlands Feb - Mar 2011

Universiteit van Amsterdam

Due to the dramatic price drop of memory network devices are configured with much larger buffer sizes than before in order to prevent packet drop. This undermines the assumptions of the TCP congestion avoidance algorithm which depends on packet loss in order to detect and prevent network congestion. We investigate the effects of this buffer bloat phenomenon on throughput and latency. Our simulations show that increasing buffer sizes reduces throughput slightly, but sharply increases latency. When the link is saturated then large buffer sizes cause dramatic reduction of throughput rates for applications which transmit data only periodically. In addition we show that TCP is in fact remarkably resilient to packet drop and can tolerate very small buffer sizes very well at the benefit of optimal latency.

Keywords : Performance simulation, Buffer bloat, Throughput, Latency, Experiment

Related Project : Buffer bloat  

PDF Prof. Dr. Cees de Laat netbuf page
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