Queueing disciplines and passive congestion control in byte-stream networks

The performance is compared of first-in-first-out and round-robin packet service disciplines at the trunk nodes of byte-stream networks, including priority service for single-packet messages. Delay and throughput characteristics are surveyed as a function of traffic mix, packet size, traffic intensity, and the ratio of trunk speed to access line speed. Exact and approximate analyses are compared with the results of simulations. Under normal traffic conditions, most disciplines will give acceptable mean delay if the ratio of trunk speed to access line speed is sufficiently high. Under congestion, round-robin disciplines have better fairness properties than first-in-first-out disciplines, in that they protect well-behaved users against hogs.<>