review of "Analysis and Simulation of a Fair Queueing Algorithm"

From: Jenny Liu (jen@cs.washington.edu)
Date: Mon Oct 25 2004 - 03:18:57 PDT

  • Next message: Craig M Prince: "Reading Review 10-25-2004"

    "Analysis and Simulation of a Fair Queueing Algorithm" establishes a
    definition of "fair" and proposes a queueing algorithm that approaches
    the ideal according to the definition. It then presents data from
    simulations of the fair queueing algorithm and a first come first served
    queueing algorithm with different flow control algorithms.

    The fair queueing algorithm meets the primary design goal that it sets
    out for itself: fair allocation of bandwidth and buffer space. However,
    not much more can be said for it.

    The design principle of fairness is meant to solve the problem of the
    malicious user, but it does not! However "user" is defined, a
    malicious person can still get around the unique idenitifcation given by
    the router to a user and hog more than his fair share of bandwidth (even
    if it may not be going towards any sort of useful work).

    Perhaps even worse, the algorithm requires each router to keep track of
    ALL users or conversations that route through it, which is unwieldy at
    best and perhaps intractable at worst.

    Furthermore, When the number of users gets high, the round-robin base
    nature of the algorithm can mean that all users have their packets sent
    extremely slowly, perhaps to the point where no useful work is being
    done by the router.

    Though perhaps a step forward from FCFS, the fair queueing algorithm
    presented here has only little more to offer.


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