Core-Stateless Fair Queueing: Achieving Approximately Fair Bandwidth Allocations in High Speed Networks

Summary

The key idea of this paper is to implement a fair queueing algorithm with low implementation complexity and resource requirements.

In core-stateless fair queueing the edge routers mark flows and compute per-flow estimates of arrival rates. Next, the core routers compute the fair-share rate based on the number of incoming flows. If a flow has a rate exceeding its fair-share, packets are dropped. This is efficient because there are a lot more edge router than core routers so the complex work of estimating rates and annotating flows is spread out.

Thoughts

This is a clever idea to spread out the work of fair queueing across lots of routers. The obvious limitation is that the edge routers must be trusted to give accurate estimates. It is also unclear if this approach is necessary given the available processing power in modern routers.