1,156 research outputs found
An Optimal Lower Bound for Buffer Management in Multi-Queue Switches
In the online packet buffering problem (also known as the unweighted FIFO
variant of buffer management), we focus on a single network packet switching
device with several input ports and one output port. This device forwards
unit-size, unit-value packets from input ports to the output port. Buffers
attached to input ports may accumulate incoming packets for later transmission;
if they cannot accommodate all incoming packets, their excess is lost. A packet
buffering algorithm has to choose from which buffers to transmit packets in
order to minimize the number of lost packets and thus maximize the throughput.
We present a tight lower bound of e/(e-1) ~ 1.582 on the competitive ratio of
the throughput maximization, which holds even for fractional or randomized
algorithms. This improves the previously best known lower bound of 1.4659 and
matches the performance of the algorithm Random Schedule. Our result
contradicts the claimed performance of the algorithm Random Permutation; we
point out a flaw in its original analysis
Buffer Overflow Management with Class Segregation
We consider a new model for buffer management of network switches with
Quality of Service (QoS) requirements. A stream of packets, each attributed
with a value representing its Class of Service (CoS), arrives over time at a
network switch and demands a further transmission. The switch is equipped with
multiple queues of limited capacities, where each queue stores packets of one
value only. The objective is to maximize the total value of the transmitted
packets (i.e., the weighted throughput).
We analyze a natural greedy algorithm, GREEDY, which sends in each time step
a packet with the greatest value. For general packet values , we show that GREEDY is -competitive, where . Furthermore, we show a lower bound of on the competitiveness of any deterministic online algorithm.
In the special case of two packet values (1 and ), GREEDY is shown
to be optimal with a competitive ratio of
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