Traffic-aware Buffer Management in Shared Memory Switches

Abstract

Switch buffer serves an important role in modern internet. To achieve efficiency, today's switches often use on-chip shared memory. Shared memory switches rely on buffer management policies to allocate buffer among ports. To avoid waste of buffer resources or a few ports occupy too much buffer, existing policies tend to maximize overall buffer utilization and pursue queue length fairness. However, blind pursuit of utilization and misleading fairness definition based on queue length leads to buffer occupation with no benefit to throughput but extends queuing delay and undermines burst absorption of other ports. We contend that a buffer management policy should proactively detect port traffic and adjust buffer allocation accordingly. In this paper, we propose Traffic-aware Dynamic Threshold (TDT) policy. On the basis of classic dynamic threshold policy, TDT proactively raise or lower port threshold to absorb burst traffic or evacuate meaningless buffer occupation. We present detailed designs of port control state transition and state decision module that detect real time traffic and change port thresholds accordingly. Simulation and DPDK-based real testbed demonstrate that TDT simultaneously optimizes for throughput, loss and delay, and reduces up to 50% flow completion time.