A Study of the Impact of Network Traffic Pacing From Network and End-User Perspectives

As the demand on the Internet bandwidth keeps increasing, all-optical network architectures emerge as a promising solution to high-speed telecommunication networks. However, the performance of optical routers/switches is sensitive to the statistics of Internet traffic due to their limited buffer size, which weakens the optical routers' capability of absorbing Internet traffic surges (known as burstiness), resulting in a high packet drop rate and, hence, lowering the quality of service. As a natural solution to the Internet traffic burstiness, pacing has long been studied and a variety of pacing techniques have been proposed in the literature.