Enhanced Queue Management Technique to address Bufferbloat

Bufferbloat is a phenomenon that occurs when large buffers become full and induce high queuing delays. It is one of the causes why users face lag when they switch apps on their smart TVs or watch streaming content on their phones. This lag (buffering) leads to user frustration (suffering). One of the most popular solutions to the problem of bufferbloat is to deploy queue management algorithms. Controlled Delay (CoDel) is one of the most popularly used algorithms in several Linux distributions. It is used together with flow queuing, which is a type of packet scheduling mechanism. Hence, the overall solution is known as FQ-CoDel and is described in detail in RFC 8290.

This talk will discuss CoDel in brief and highlight the shortcomings that we have encountered during our research at NITK Surathkal. Subsequently, a revised version of CoDel will be discussed, which is a result of our team’s effort in addressing the problem of Bufferbloat. Lastly, we will compare the results obtained from CoDel and revised CoDel in terms of user perceived delay and throughput. We will also showcase sample results which we have obtained by testing our revised version of CoDel in a college WiFi setup.