Small packets aggregation in an IP domain

Abstract

With the emergence of new multimedia applications and the large standardization effort of packet telephony products, a large volume of small packet traffic flows in the network. It is expected to get worse with the popularity of VoIP applications. To mitigate the impact of small packets we propose the aggregation of packets present in the output queue and which have the same forwarding equivalence class, such as those which will leave a routing domain from the same node (an egress node). The set of aggregated packets will be subsequently treated as a single packet, thus requiring smaller processing overhead at intermediate routers. We report the results of several simulations that evaluate the performance benefits of aggregation. We note that aggregation keeps the same behavior as pure FIFO. Thus it doesn't disturb the aggregator router behavior. It saves CPU processing time and buffer space at intermediate routers, thus improving the overall network performance.