Jump to content

Blue (queue management algorithm)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Bkonrad (talk | contribs) at 11:26, 5 June 2010 (rm inapplicable hatnote -- see WP:NAMB). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

Blue[1] is an Active Queue Management algorithm. Like RED, it operates by randomly dropping or ECN-marking packets in a router's queue before it overflows. Unlike RED, however, it requires little or no tuning on the part of the network administrator.

Stochastic Fair Blue

The main flaw of Blue, which it shares with most single-queue queing disciplines, is that it doesn't distinguish between flows, and treats all flows as a single aggregate. Therefore, a single aggressive flow can push out of the queue packets belonging to other, better behaved flows.

Stochastic Fair Blue (SFB)[2] is a stochastically fair variant of blue which hashes flows and maintains a different mark/drop probability for each hash value. Assuming no hash collisions, SFB is able to provide a fair share of buffer space for every flow. In the presence of hash collisions, SFB is only stochastically fair.

Unlike other stochastically fair queuing disciplines, such as SFQ, SFB can be implemented using a Bloom filter rather than a hash table, which dramatically reduces its storage requirements when the number of flows is large.

When a flow's drop/mark probability reaches 1, the flow has been shown to not react to congestion indications from the network. Such an inelastic flow is put in a penalty box, and rate-limited.

References

  1. ^ W. Feng, D. Kandlur, D. Saha, K. Shin. Blue: A New Class of Active Queue Management Algorithms. U. Michigan CSE-TR-387-99, April 1999.
  2. ^ Wu-Chang Feng, Dilip D. Kandlur, Debanjan Saha, Kang G. Shin. Stochastic Fair Blue: an algorithm for enforcing fairness. In Proc. INFOCOM'2001. 2001.