Bufferbloat systematic analysis

There is a recent interest in the bufferbloat phenomenon as a possible explanation for the increased network latency observed in the Internet. The 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. Therefore, in this paper, we present a systematic analysis of the bufferbloat phenomenon considering the microscopic view of the insides in the buffer architecture of typical network devices. Our experimental results show that bufferbloat might not be a significant problem in practice. First, the phenomenon is only observed in specific cases. Second, changes made to the queues under the control of the operating system have negligible effects. Finally, recent versions of the Linux kernel avoid bufferbloat, even in the specific cases in which it was observed.