Competitive Buffer Management with Packet Dependencies Alex Kesselman, Google Boaz Patt-Shamir, Tel Aviv University Gabriel Scalosub, University of Toronto
Jan 05, 2016
Competitive Buffer Management with Packet Dependencies
Alex Kesselman, GoogleBoaz Patt-Shamir, Tel Aviv University
Gabriel Scalosub, University of Toronto
IPDPS 2009 Competitive Buffer Management with Packet Dependencies
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Motivation: Video Streaming
• Smart encoding:– Suffices to recover many
• Every video frame is fragmented into packets• Restoration depends on recovering all packets• If packets are lost:– Affects other packets as well (become redundant)– Streaming: retransmission is not an option
IPDPS 2009 Competitive Buffer Management with Packet Dependencies
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Buffering Schematics
buffer management
incoming packets
outgoingstream
dropped packets
finite linkspeed (“drain rate”)
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Buffer and Traffic Model
• Single FIFO queue of size • Discrete time:– Delivery substep
• One packet delivered from head of queue
– Arrival substep• Packets arrive• Some packets may be dropped• Packets accommodated in the buffer
• Traffic: frames consists of packets
• Goal: Maximize number of whole frames delivered
frame ‘s j-packet
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Previous Work
• Buffer management for QoS– Multi-valued packets– Constant competitive ratio for
finite values
• Some results for multiple buffers
• No results about co-dependent packets!
[Kesselman et al., 2004],[Englert & Westerman, 2006],
and many more
[Lapid et al., 2000],
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Our Results
• Frames consisting of k>1 parts
• Bad news: No finite competitive ratio in general
• Good news: If frame parts are consistently ordered– There exists an algorithm with c.r. – All deterministic algorithms have c.r.
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Preliminaries
• Offline– Closely related to k-DM (as hard)– Simple greedy algorithm is a (k+1)-approximation
• Online (arbitrary traffic)– Not much you can do
…
time
OPT
ALG
…
packetsALG
OPT
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Restricted Traffic
• Problem:– Selective unbounded delay/burstiness
• Model requirement (solution):– Both ALG and OPT have to deal with same delay/burstiness
• Order-respecting traffic:– Frame order induced by j-packets is the same for every j
• OK: 2.1 (frame 2, part 1), 3.1, 2.2, 3.2• Not OK: 3.1, 2.1, 2.2, 3.2
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All Is Well if Order-Respecting?
• Answer: Yes and No
• No:– Any deterministic algorithm has competitive ratio at least
• Yes:– A natural preemptive greedy approach– Conservative non-preemptive approaches
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Static-Partitioning Algorithm (SPA)
• Intuition– Think ahead: focus on admission control– Virtually partition the buffer into k levels of size
• Buffer is still FIFO!!
– Level j only holds j-packets– Level j accepts j-packets that are “evenly” spaced in time
• Alternating accept/reject periods
– Levels synchronize on frame index• Ensures delivered packets correspond to the same frame
• Extra perk: non-preemptive
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Example: SPA for k-FTM (k=2)
• Consider level 1, i.e., 1-packets
• 1-sync frame indices:• Accepts first 1-packets after every 1-sync– Specifically, has sufficient buffer space
time
Accept packetsWait time unitsAccept packetsWait time units
is the first 1-packet arriving after reject period is the first 1-packet arriving after reject period
A R RA
is the first 1-packet
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Example: SPA for k-FTM (k=2)
• Consider level 2, i.e., 2-packets
• 2-sync indices 1-sync indices• Accepts first 2-packets after every 2-sync– Specifically, has sufficient buffer space
time
Accept packetsWait time units
A R
is the first 2-packet
Accept packetsWait time units
A R
is the first 2-packet of a 1-sync arriving after reject period is the first 2-packet of a 1-sync arriving after reject period
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Summary
• A new model in buffer management– Traffic has inter-packet dependencies
• Highly applicable to, e.g., video streaming
• First analytic results (still a lot to discover…)– Competitive algorithms (and lower bounds)– Complexity
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Still Open
• Gap: vs.
• Randomization– Useful in the packet-weights models
• How does it work for real traffic?– Is greedy still an option?
• Using forward-error-correction (FEC)– Suffices to deliver m-of-k– Some preliminary results, but still a lot to discover
Thank You!