A Rate and Resource Detection Based Receive Buffer Adaptation Approach for High-Speed Data Transportation

With the development of computing devices and networks, several efficient and high performance UDP-based protocols have been proposed and employed in recently emerging computing paradigms, e.g., pervasive or cloud computing, to transport large data. However, since the server in such protocols uses a fixed-size memory buffer to hold received packets before handling them, the buffer will be exhausted if these packets cannot be handled as fast as they arrive, impairing the performance dramatically even if there is plenty of free memory. To solve this problem, we propose a Rate and Resource Detection Based Buffer Adaptation Approach (RRDA). RRDA collects the difference between the server receiving and processing rate and the amount of free memory periodically. Based on these information, RRDA decides whether the receive buffer should be resized and if so, to what extent to adjust. RRDA can not only avoid the exhaustion of receive buffer when the server load is heavy, but also can free unnecessary memory when the load is low. Experimental results show that RRDA can reduce the occurrence of buffer exhaustion by a factor of 10 and improve the throughput remarkably, compared with the fixed-size buffer scheme.