LCA: Vint Cerf on re-engineering the Internet

LCA: Vint Cerf on re-engineering the Internet

Posted Jan 25, 2011 13:35 UTC (Tue) by gmaxwell (subscriber, #30048)
In reply to: LCA: Vint Cerf on re-engineering the Internet by gdt
Parent article: LCA: Vint Cerf on re-engineering the Internet

> The routers along that pipe need nowhere near that, rather buffering appropriate for the bandwidth and delay of the next hop,

Woah woah there. We're not doing hop by hop congestion control. There is no explicit back-pressure. It's TCP end to end. The routers need enough buffers to "fill the pipe" too, and it's ultimately the TCP sender on the ends that the buffers in the network need to satisfy.

In the degenerate case of a single flow across the whole network each of the routers absolutely do need the full delay-bandwidth product buffering that you point out for the host in order to keep the pipes full. This is old knowledge, established by rigorous mathematical analysis, simulation, an real world experiments. This is the classic paper on the subject.

More recent research has established that under certain assumptions the amount of router buffering can be greatly reduced: If there are a great many flows, no super-large flows that completely dominate the link on their own, and the RTTs seen by the flows are well distributed then the buffer requirements can be reduced by an amount proportional to the square root of the number of flows. More information can be found here.

In terms of router buffer bloat, I think it's more of an combination of issues of buffers far in excess of the delay/bandwidth product from manufacturers building for the worst case (e.g. aussies with ten gigabit flows), and service providers (and their most demanding customers) being far more concerned about packet loss than jitter/delay for best effort traffic. For high value jitter sensitive traffic the equipment can always be configured to handle it differently (e.g. anything with buffers big enough to cause problems can do differentiated queuing with a strict high priority queue), but that doesn't help joe-sixpack on DSL at home.

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