Dynamic Buffer Size Allocation in Wireless Networks for Non-Elastic Traffic

Abstract

The dimensioning of the buffers in communication devices (routers and switches) is an important aspect to take into account since it affects some parameters of network performance such as: loss probability, end-to-end delay as well as transmission channels utilization, etc. The properly solution to dynamic buffer size allocation is based on maximum entropy. This mechanism proposes the network devices become able to dynamically self-configure their buffer sizes guaranteeing a specific packet loss probability with the minimum buffer size. With this solution, the bufferbloat effect is minimizing, which introduces unnecessary excessive delays to the users caused by the over-dimensioning of the buffer size. Also, it allows optimizing the memory utilization, which could be very beneficial in network devices with multiple interfaces. This work implements the dynamic buffer size allocation solution based on maximum entropy in shared channels such as the Wireless LAN (WLAN) and Wireless Mesh Networks (WMN). It is demonstrated the efficient operation of the dynamic mechanism through measured performance and operation parameters. In the networks WLAN and WMN, the algorithm has been evaluated with default mechanisms for medium access channel: DCF (Distributed Coordination Function) and EDCAF (Enhanced Distributed Channel Access Function) respectively. For EDCAF, two classes of service have been taking into account.