On the Effectiveness of Buffer in Deterministic Services

We study the utility of buffer at switches in increasing the achievable utilization of a network providing deterministic guarantee. To determine the increase in utilization, we classify packet scheduling algorithms into two classes. Only one of these classes can utilize additional buffers to increase the achievable utilization. We experimentally determine the difference in achievable utilization of these classes. Our experiments demonstrate that contrary to intuition, in most cases, additional buffers do not lead to higher achievable utilization of a network. 1 Introduction Integrated services networks support a diverse set of applications (e.g., data, audio, interactive video, stored video applications). The traffic characteristics as well as Quality of Service (QoS) requirements of these diverse applications vary significantly. To meet the QoS of requirements of the applications, a network has to manage two resources: link bandwidth and packet buffers. While several packet schedulin..