Buffer Design Under Bursty Traffic with Applications in FCoE Storage Area Networks

This article studies the buffer requirements to design the Enhanced Ethernet required by Data Center applications, with bounded buffer overflow probability. The design criteria considers a bursty traffic arrival process, as it shows from conventional read/write SCSI operations in a Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) scenario. The results show that the buffer must be between one and two orders of magnitude larger than the maximum burst size to provide negligible buffer overflow probability. We complete our study by testing our assumptions with real FCoE measurement traces.