Low complexity multi-resource fair queueing with bounded delay

Middleboxes are ubiquitous in today´s networks. They perform deep packet processing such as content-based filtering and transformation, which requires multiple categories of resources (e.g., CPU, memory bandwidth, and link bandwidth). Depending on the processing requirement of traffic, packet processing for different flows may consume vastly different amounts of resources. Multi-resource fair queueing allows flows to obtain a fair share of these resources, providing service isolation across flows. However, previous solutions for multi-resource fair queueing are either expensive to implement at high speeds, or incurring high scheduling delay for flows with uneven weights. In this paper, we present a new fair queueing algorithm, called Group Multi-Resource Round Robin (GMR³), that schedules packets in O(1) time, while achieving near-perfect fairness with a low scheduling delay bounded by a small constant. To our knowledge, it is the first provably fair, highly efficient multi-resource fair queueing algorithm with bounded delay.