Scheduling packets over multiple interfaces while respecting user preferences

  • Authors:

  • Kok-Kiong Yap;Te-Yuan Huang;Yiannis Yiakoumis;Sandeep Chinchali;Nick McKeown;Sachin Katti

  • Affiliations:

  • Google/Stanford University, Mountain View/Stanford, CA, USA;Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA;Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA;Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA;Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA;Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the ninth ACM conference on Emerging networking experiments and technologies
  • Year:
  • 2013

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Abstract

Now that our smartphones have multiple interfaces (WiFi, 3G, 4G, etc.), we have preferences for which interfaces an application may use. We may prefer to stream video over WiFi because it is fast, but VoIP over 3G because it gives continued connectivity. We also have relative preferences, such as giving Netflix twice as much capacity as Dropbox. This means our mobile devices need to schedule packets in keeping with our preferences while making use of all the capacity available. This is the natural domain of fair queuing, and this paper is about the design of a packet scheduler to meet these requirements. We show that traditional fair queueing schedulers cannot take into account a user's preferences for some interfaces over others. We present a novel packet scheduler called miDRR that meets our needs by generalizing DRR for multiple interfaces. We demonstrate a prototype running in Linux and show that it works correctly and can easily run at the speeds we need.