An optimal buffer management scheme with dynamic thresholds

Abstract

In a shared-memory switch, buffer management schemes ate needed to ensure the fair share of memory among different port queues to meet the QoS guarantees for different service classes. While static partitioning provides firewalls between classes, dynamic partitioning of buffer leads to better efficiency. In this paper, we propose a hierarchical buffer management scheme for an ATM switch where a combination of static and dynamic thresholds are used to ensure efficient and fair usage of buffer memory. In particular, we develop and analyze a novel dynamic threshold based buffer management scheme which, while ensuring fair sharing of memory, maximizes the overall memory utilization compared to the existing literature on dynamic buffer thresholds. The scheme is easy to implement for practical applications and is shown by simulation to have good performance under a variety of traffic loading conditions.