Lower and Upper Bounds on FIFO Buffer Management in QoS Switches

We consider FIFO buffer management for switches providing differentiated services. In each time step, an arbitrary number of packets arrive, and only one packet can be sent. The buffer can store a limited number of packets, and, due to the FIFO property, the sequence of sent packets has to be a subsequence of the arriving packets. The differentivice model is abstracted by attributing each packet with a value according to its service level. A buffer management strategy can drop packets. The goal is to maximize the sum of values of sent packets. For only two different packet values, we introduce the account strategy and prove that this strategy achieves an optimal competitive ratio of

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2006
• Where: ESA
• Authors: Matthias Englert, Matthias Westermann
• Keywords: Algorithms, Buffer Management, ESA 2006, FIFO Buffer Management, Sent Packets