Evaluation of FIFO-based buffer management algorithms for TCP over guaranteed frame rate service

We study the issue of providing rate guarantees to TCP connections. Different buffer management algorithms for FIFO based scheduling are evaluated by means of analysis and simulation. We show that several FIFO based queueing algorithms result in an unacceptable level of fairness. While weighted fair queueing is particularly adapted to rate guarantees and fair sharing of available network bandwidth, it is considered as the long term solution due to the complex mechanisms that have to be implemented in the switches. We present in this paper some issues and solutions to provide rate guarantees using FIFO buffers as a short term solution. In order to compare different algorithms we introduce a new quantitative fairness metric. A fine tuning of different parameters related to guaranteed frame rate is proposed