Queuing disciplines and passive congestion control in byte-stream networks

The mean delay and throughput characteristics of various trunk queuing disciplines of the FIFO (first in, first out) and round-robin types for byte-stream data networks are investigated. It is shown that, under normal traffic, high-speed trunks substantially reduce queuing delays. Almost any queuing discipline will give acceptable delay if the backbone network is sufficiently faster than the access lines. In the absence of high-speed trunks, both the packet FIFO and the round-robin discipline can be augmented with a priority queue that expedites single-packet messages, which may carry network control signals or echoplex characters. In FIFO-type disciplines, the mean delays of messages that do not go through the priority queue depend on the overall message length distribution. A sprinkling of very long messages can significantly increase the mean delays of other messages. In disciplines of round-robin type, the mean delay of each message type is not affected by the presence of very long messages of other types