Router Buffer Sizing Revisited: The Role of the Output/Input Capacity Ratio

The issue of router buffer sizing is still open and significant. Previous work either considers open-loop traffic or only analyzes persistent TCP flows. This paper differs in two ways. First, it considers the more realistic case of non-persistent TCP flows with heavy-tailed size distribution. Second, instead of only looking at link metrics, the authors focus on the impact of buffer sizing on TCP performance. Specifically, the goal is to find the buffer size that maximizes the average per-flow TCP throughput.