A Practical On-Line Pacing Scheme at Edges of Small Buffer Networks

For the optical packet-switching routers to be widely deployed in the Internet, the size of packet buffers on routers has to be significantly small. Such small-buffer networks rely on traffic with low levels of burstiness to avoid buffer overflows and packet losses. The authors present a pacing system that proactively shapes traffic in the edge network to reduce burstiness. Their queue length based pacing uses an adaptive pacing on a single queue and paces traffic indiscriminately where deployed. In this paper, they show through analysis and simulation that this pacing approach introduces a bounded delay and that it effectively reduces traffic burstiness. They also show that it can achieve higher throughput than end-system based pacing.