A programmable buffer management platform

Kirill Kogan, Danushka Menikkumbura, Gustavo Petri, Yangtae Noh, Sergey I. Nikolenko, Alexander Sirotkin, Patrick Eugster

Abstract: Buffering architectures and policies for their efficient management constitute one of the core ingredients of a network architecture. However, despite strong incentives to experiment with, and deploy, new policies, the opportunities for alterating anything beyond minor elements of such policies are limited. In this work we introduce a new specification language, OpenQueue, that allows users to specify entire buffering architectures and policies conveniently through several comparators and simple functions. We show examples of buffer management policies in OpenQueue and empirically demonstrate its direct impact on performance in various settings.