Deficit Round Robin favors longer documents

Abstract

In packet networks, round robin scheduling can be used to achieve equal sharing of transmission link resources via segmentation and reassembly of packets. However, with varying packet sizes and in the absence of segmentation and reassembly, packet by packet round robin results in unfair sharing in favor of longer packets. The deficit round robin scheduling has been proposed to alleviate this problem. However, our results show that deficit round robin also results in some unfairness in favor of longer packets and this unfairness is also sensitive to different traffic mixes. Furthermore, the measures taken to reduce the implementation complexity of deficit round robin also magnifies this unfairness