BShare: Packet Queueing Delay-Driven Buffer Sharing for Datacenter Switches
For datacenter network operators, BShare offers a simpler and more effective buffer management solution that enhances performance of modern transport protocols.
BShare is a simple buffer sharing mechanism for datacenter switches that uses packet queueing delay with a single configurable parameter, improving flow completion time (FCT) of advanced transport protocols like PowerTCP by up to 45.07% compared to ABM under burst-heavy workloads.
Modern datacenter switches share packet buffers across ports to boost overall throughput and reduce packet loss. However, as buffer availability per-port-per-bandwidth unit continues to decrease, existing buffer-sharing strategies face increasing performance challenges. Recent efforts have attempted to integrate Buffer Management (BM) with Active Queue Management (AQM) to harness the advantages of both BM and AQM approaches to improve performance. While these hybrid solutions show promise, their complexity of dynamically calculating multiple factors for integration hinders generalization and efficiency. This paper presents BShare, a simple buffer sharing mechanism that uses packet queueing delay. BShare requires only a single operator-configurable parameter. Our simulation results show that BSHARE improves the flow completion time (FCT) performance of advanced transport protocols, such as PowerTCP, by up to 45.07% compared to ABM, particularly under burst-heavy datacenter workloads.