Paper review: Analysis and Simulation of a Fair Queueing Algorithm

Reviewer: Jason Oh

  1. The purpose of this paper is to introduce, analyze and simulate an algorithm that provides fair queueing of traffic.
  2. This paper mainly presents a new analysis of an algorithm based on previous work by J. Nagle. The modification to Nagle's algorithm comes primarily in his treatment of packet length as well as promptness allocation. The authors come up with their version by first setting their design requirements for a fair queueing algorithm, explaining where Nagle's work falls short, and then introducing their own algorithm.
  3. First-come-first-serve queueing algorithms do not provide a fair allocation of bandwidth, do not provide lower delay for sources using less bandwidth, and does not protect from malicious sources.
  4. This paper rates around a 4 for its contribution because they provide a novel approach to bandwidth sharing that provides measurable improvements over current first-come-first-serve queueing algorithms.
  5. Their approach is methodical and thorough. They set design requirements, meet them with their algorithm, create an implementation, and provide data from a simulation to back up their analysis.
  6. The authors address two objections to the fair queueing approach. One is that some source-destination pairs, such as file server or mail server pairs, need more than their fair share of bandwidth. The question that the authors leave open is whether gateways can be built to satisfy the requirements of fair queueing.