article

QFQ: efficient packet scheduling with tight guarantees

Authors:

Fabio Checconi,

Luigi Rizzo, and

Paolo ValenteAuthors Info & Claims

IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking (TON), Volume 21, Issue 3

Pages 802 - 816

https://doi.org/10.1109/TNET.2012.2215881

Published: 01 June 2013 Publication History

Abstract

Packet scheduling, together with classification, is one of the most expensive processing steps in systems providing tight bandwidth and delay guarantees at high packet rates. Schedulers with near-optimal service guarantees and O(1) time complexity have been proposed in the past, using techniques such as timestamp rounding and flow grouping to keep their execution time small. However, even the two best proposals in this family have a per-packet cost component that is linear either in the number of groups or in the length of the packet being transmitted. Furthermore, no studies are available on the actual execution time of these algorithms. In this paper we make two contributions. First, we present Quick Fair Queueing (QFQ), a new O(1) scheduler that provides near-optimal guarantees and is the first to achieve that goal with a truly constant cost also with respect to the number of groups and the packet length. The QFQ algorithm has no loops and uses very simple instructions and data structures that contribute to its speed of operation. Second, we have developed production-quality implementations of QFQ and of its closest competitors, which we use to present a detailed comparative performance analysis of the various algorithms. Experiments show that QFQ fulfills our expectations, outperforming the other algorithms in the same class. In absolute terms, even on a low-end workstation, QFQ takes about 110 ns for an enqueue()/dequeue() pair (only twice the time of DRR, but with much better service guarantees).

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QFQ: efficient packet scheduling with tight guarantees

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Published In

cover image IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking

IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking Volume 21, Issue 3

June 2013

336 pages

ISSN:1063-6692

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IEEE Press

Publication History

Published: 01 June 2013

Accepted: 10 March 2012

Revised: 26 August 2011

Received: 25 November 2010

Published in TON Volume 21, Issue 3

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https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/COMST.2023.3301820
Saeed AZhao YDukkipati NAmmar MZegura EHarras KVahdat ALorch JYu M(2019)EiffelProceedings of the 16th USENIX Conference on Networked Systems Design and Implementation10.5555/3323234.3323237(17-31)Online publication date: 26-Feb-2019
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