On the Interoperability of Bufferbloat Solutions

Abstract

Bufferbloat phenomenon is related to the excessive packet queuing in over-sized buffers inside the network that may lead to network performance degradation. In this context, we observe a lack of experimental results considering the practical aspects of off-the-shelf network devices. In this paper, we present a systematic analysis of the bufferbloat phenomenon considering the microscopic view of the buffer architecture of typical network devices. Moreover, we evaluate the most common fighting bufferbloat solutions recently proposed in the literature, such as BQL, CoDel, FQ-CoDel, and PIE. In fact, we have only observed bufferbloat effects under particular configurations. Second, all approaches we have tested are efficient against bufferbloat, although presenting different performances. Finally, mechanism we have evaluated can interoperate. We only notice a bad performance under a misconfigured BQL; actually results suggest a misconfigured BQL is worse than no BQL at all.