Congratulations to Neda, Yashar, Monia, Nick and Geoff for their best paper award at the Internet Measurement Conference. Their paper Experimental Study of Router Buffer Sizing tests out recent results on buffer requirements of high-speed routers that serve highly aggregated traffic. Amongst other things it verifies the C/sqrt(n) result from my thesis as well as my former office mate Yashar Ganjali’s work on very small buffers and find that they hold well.
It is great to see this work getting recognized, but what is even more encouraging is that two router vendors privately confirmed to me that the next generation of some of their products will have substantially smaller buffers. This not only reduces power consumption, but also means that we are less likely to see latency spike whenever peering points or core links are congested.