Abstract:

The scalability of fair queueing depends on the number of flows that have, or recently have had, packets in the queue. Applying known facts about statistical traffic characteristics at flow level, we demonstrate that this number is typically very small for any link capacity. This suggests fair queueing may be perfectly feasible, opening interesting possibilities for the development of the Internet architecture. The evaluation is based on trace simulations and an analytical traffic model. We discuss implementation considerations in the light of the derived results and point to significant outstanding issues.