Can multipath mitigate power law delays?: effects of parallelism on tail performance

—Parallelism has often been used to improve the reliability and efficiency of a variety of different engineering systems. In this paper, we quantify the efficiency of parallelism in systems that are prone to failures and exhibit power law processing durations. We focus on the context of transmitting a data unit in communication networks, where parallelism can be achieved by multipath transmission (e.g., multipath routing). We investigate two types of transmission schemes: redundant and split transmission techniques. We find that the power-law transmission delay phenomenon still persists with multipath transmission. In particular, we show that when the transmission delays of each path are characterized by the same power law, redundant multipath transmission can only result in a constant factor performance gain, while order gains are possible when the delays are light tailed. We further compare the performance of redundant transmission and split transmission, and show that there is ...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2010
• Where: SIGMETRICS
• Authors: Jian Tan, Wei Wei, Bo Jiang, Ness Shroff, Donald F. Towsley
• Keywords: Hardware, Multipath Transmission, SIGMETRICS 2010, Split Transmission, Transmission Delays