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Traditional wisdom recommends that a network node should be able to buffer an end-to-end round-trip time's worth of line-rate traffic, in order to be able to accomodate bursts of TCP traffic. This recommendation is often followed in "core" IP networks. For example, FPC (Flexible PIC Concentrators) on Juniper's M- and T-Series routers contain buffer memory for 200ms (M-series) or 100ms (T-series) at the supported interface bandwidth (cf. Juniper M-Series Datasheet and a posting from 8 May, 2005 by Hannes Gredler to the juniper-nsp mailing list.) These ideas also influenced RFC 3819, Advice for Internet Subnetwork Designers.

Recent research results suggest that much smaller buffers are sufficient when there is a high degree of multiplexing of TCP streams. This work is highly relevant, because overly large buffers not only require more (expensive high-speed) memory, but bring about a risk of high delays that affect perceived quality of service; see BufferBloat Bufferbloat.

References

• ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communications Review
  • The October 2006 edition has a short summary paper on router buffer sizing. If you read one article, read this!
  • The July 2005 edition (Volume 35 , Issue 3) has a special feature about sizing router buffers, containing of these articles:
• Making router buffers much smallerNick ,N. McKeown, Damon D. Wischik
  • Part I: buffer sizes for core routers
  • Nick , N. McKeown, Damon D. Wischik
  • Part II: control theory for buffer sizing
  • Gaurav , G. Raina, Don D. Towsley, Damon D. Wischik
  • Part III: routers with very small buffers
  • Mihaela , M. Enachescu, Yashar Y. Ganjali, Ashish A. Goel, Nick N. McKeown, Tim T. Roughgarden
• Sizing Router Buffers (copy)Guido Appenzeller Isaac Keslassy Nick , G. Appenzeller, I. Keslassy, N. McKeown, SIGCOMM'04, in: ACM Computer Communications Review 34(4), pp. 281--292ACM CCR, October 2004
• The Effect of Router Buffer Size on HighSpeed TCP Performance, Dhiman Barman, Georgios Smaragdakis and Ibrahim Matta, Proc. In Proceedings of IEEE Globecom 2004. (PowerPoint presentation)
• Link Buffer Sizing: a New Look at the Old Problem, Sergey Gorinsky, A. Kantawala, and J. Turner, ISCC-05, June 2005
  Another version was published as (Technical Report WUCSE-2004-82, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Washington University in St. Louis, December 2004.)
• Effect of Large Buffers on TCP Queueing Behavior, Jinsheng Sun, Moshe Zukerman, King-Tim Ko, Guanrong Chen and Sammy Chan, IEEE INFOCOM 2004
• A Critique of Recently Proposed Buffer-Sizing Strategies, G.Vu-Brugier, R.S. Stanojevic, D.J. Leith, R.N. Shorten, ACM CCR, January 2007
• High Performance TCP in ANSNET, C. Villamizar and C. Song., in: ACM Computer Communications Review, ACM CCR 24(5), pp.45--6045–60, 1994
• RFC 3819, Advice for Internet Subnetwork Designers, P. Karn, Ed., C. Bormann, G. Fairhurst, D. Grossman, R. Ludwig, J. Mahdavi, G. Montenegro, J. Touch, L. Wood. July 2004
• Buffer Sizing in the Internet, Web page, Stanford University, last accessed: 2019-03-11

– Main.SimonLeinen - 2005-01-07 - 20132019-0403-0311