Abstract
Network operators want to enforce fair bandwidth sharing between users without solely relying on congestion control running on end-user devices. However, in edge networks (e.g., 5G), the number of user devices sharing a bottleneck link far exceeds the number of queues supported by today's switch hardware; even accurately tracking per-user sending rates may become too resource-intensive. Meanwhile, traditional software-based queuing on CPUs struggles to meet the high throughput and low latency demanded by 5G users. We propose Approximate Hierarchical Allocation of Bandwidth (AHAB), a per-user bandwidth limit enforcer that runs fully in the data plane of commodity switches. AHAB tracks each user's approximate traffic rate and compares it against a bandwidth limit, which is iteratively updated via a real-time feedback loop to achieve max-min fairness across users. Using a novel sketch data structure, AHAB avoids storing per-user state, and therefore scales to thousands of slices and millions of users. Furthermore, AHAB supports network slicing, where each slice has a guaranteed share of the bandwidth that can be scavenged by other slices when under-utilized. Evaluation shows AHAB can achieve fair bandwidth allocation within 3.1ms, 13x faster than prior data-plane hierarchical schedulers.
Original language | English (US) |
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Pages (from-to) | 1423-1434 |
Number of pages | 12 |
Journal | IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking |
Volume | 32 |
Issue number | 2 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - Apr 1 2024 |
Externally published | Yes |
All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes
- Software
- Electrical and Electronic Engineering
- Computer Networks and Communications
- Computer Science Applications
Keywords
- Network slicing
- P4
- admission control
- fair queuing
- packet scheduling
- programmable data plane