Congestion avoidance and control
SIGCOMM '88 Symposium proceedings on Communications architectures and protocols
High performance TCP in ANSNET
ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review
Dynamics of IP traffic: a study of the role of variability and the impact of control
Proceedings of the conference on Applications, technologies, architectures, and protocols for computer communication
ICNP '97 Proceedings of the 1997 International Conference on Network Protocols (ICNP '97)
Provisioning internet backbone networks to support latency sensitive applications
Provisioning internet backbone networks to support latency sensitive applications
NIST Net: a Linux-based network emulation tool
ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review
Proceedings of the 2004 conference on Applications, technologies, architectures, and protocols for computer communications
Self-configuring network traffic generation
Proceedings of the 4th ACM SIGCOMM conference on Internet measurement
Open issues in router buffer sizing
ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review
Buffer sizing in internet routers
Buffer sizing in internet routers
Router buffer sizing revisited: the role of the output/input capacity ratio
CoNEXT '07 Proceedings of the 2007 ACM CoNEXT conference
Measuring the congestion responsiveness of internet traffic
PAM'07 Proceedings of the 8th international conference on Passive and active network measurement
The effects of fairness in buffer sizing
NETWORKING'07 Proceedings of the 6th international IFIP-TC6 conference on Ad Hoc and sensor networks, wireless networks, next generation internet
Perspectives on router buffer sizing: recent results and open problems
ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review
PLUG: flexible lookup modules for rapid deployment of new protocols in high-speed routers
Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM 2009 conference on Data communication
Measurement methods for fast and accurate blackhole identification with binary tomography
Proceedings of the 9th ACM SIGCOMM conference on Internet measurement conference
Denial of service attacks in networks with tiny buffers
INFOCOM'09 Proceedings of the 28th IEEE international conference on Computer Communications Workshops
The case for hardware transactional memory in software packet processing
Proceedings of the 6th ACM/IEEE Symposium on Architectures for Networking and Communications Systems
Optical packet buffers for backbone internet routers
IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking (TON)
Buffer sizing for 802.11-based networks
IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking (TON)
Operating a network link at 100%
PAM'11 Proceedings of the 12th international conference on Passive and active measurement
Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Queueing Theory and Network Applications
Anomalous loss performance for mixed real-time and TCP traffic in routers with very small buffers
IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking (TON)
Approximate fairness through limited flow list
Proceedings of the 23rd International Teletraffic Congress
FIFO Service with Differentiated Queueing
Proceedings of the 2011 ACM/IEEE Seventh Symposium on Architectures for Networking and Communications Systems
Less is more: trading a little bandwidth for ultra-low latency in the data center
NSDI'12 Proceedings of the 9th USENIX conference on Networked Systems Design and Implementation
ECO-ALOC: Energy-efficient resource allocation for cluster-based software routers
Computer Networks: The International Journal of Computer and Telecommunications Networking
Unmasking the growing UDP traffic in a campus network
PAM'12 Proceedings of the 13th international conference on Passive and Active Measurement
Sharing small optical buffers between real-time and TCP traffic
Optical Switching and Networking
Proceedings of the 7th Latin American Networking Conference
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During the past four years, several papers have proposed rules for sizing buffers in Internet core routers. Appenzeller et al. suggest that a link needs a buffer of size O(C/√N), where C is the capacity of the link, and N is the number of flows sharing the link. If correct, buffers could be reduced by 99% in a typical backbone router today without loss in throughput. Enachecsu et al., and Raina et al. suggest that buffers can be reduced even further to 20-50 packets if we are willing to sacrifice a fraction of link capacities, and if there is a large ratio between the speed of core and access links. If correct, this is a five orders of magnitude reduction in buffer sizes. Each proposal is based on theoretical analysis and validated using simulations. Given the potential benefits (and the risk of getting it wrong!) it is worth asking if these results hold in real operational networks. In this paper, we report buffer-sizing experiments performed on real networks - either laboratory networks with commercial routers as well as customized switching and monitoring equipment (UW Madison, Sprint ATL, and University of Toronto), or operational backbone networks (Level 3 Communications backbone network, Internet2, and Stanford). The good news: Subject to the limited scenarios we can create, the buffer sizing results appear to hold. While we are confident that the O(C/√N) will hold quite generally for backbone routers, the 20-50 packet rule should be applied with extra caution to ensure that network components satisfy the underlying assumptions.