Paper Review : Analysis and Simulation of a Fair Queueing Algorithm

Reviewer : Seh Leng Lim

This paper proposes a fair queueing algorithm based on an earlier work by Nagle.

The main contribution of the paper is its analysis and simulation of its fair queueing algorithm as compared with the First-Come-First-Serve (FCFS) algorithm.

The key main ideas expounded are :

(a) Queueing algorithm needs to allocate bandwidth and buffer space fairly.

(b) Queueing algorithm needs to control the promptness or delay, allocation independently of bandwidth and buffer allocation

© The idea of modifying the bit-by-bit round robin model to take into account the starting and finishing times of a packet transmission

I think that the paper has a modest contribution (rating of 3) to the study of network queueing algorithms. As acknowledged by the authors, they have only compared their algorithm with the simplest FCFS one. Therefore, there is still a lot of work to be done to ascertain the usefulness of this algorithm viz a viz the other current works in this area.

Researchers and builders working with network applications may have a better appreciation from this paper of the difficulties involved in implementing network queueing algorithms.