QFQ+ inherits from QFQ a design choice that may cause a high packet
delay/jitter and a severe short-term unfairness. As QFQ, QFQ+ uses a
special quantity, the system virtual time, to track the service
provided by the ideal system it approximates. When a packet is
dequeued, this quantity must be incremented by the size of the packet,
divided by the sum of the weights of the aggregates waiting to be
served. Tracking this sum correctly is a non-trivial task, because, to
preserve tight service guarantees, the decrement of this sum must be
delayed in a special way [1]: this sum can be decremented only after
that its value would decrease also in the ideal system approximated by
QFQ+. For efficiency, QFQ+ keeps track only of the 'instantaneous'
weight sum, increased and decreased immediately as the weight of an
aggregate changes, and as an aggregate is created or destroyed (which,
in its turn, happens as a consequence of some class being
created/destroyed/changed). However, to avoid the problems caused to
service guarantees by these immediate decreases, QFQ+ increments the
system virtual time using the maximum value allowed for the weight
sum, 2^10, in place of the dynamic, instantaneous value. The
instantaneous value of the weight sum is used only to check whether a
request of weight increase or a class creation can be satisfied.
Unfortunately, the problems caused by this choice are worse than the
temporary degradation of the service guarantees that may occur, when a
class is changed or destroyed, if the instantaneous value of the
weight sum was used to update the system virtual time. In fact, the
fraction of the link bandwidth guaranteed by QFQ+ to each aggregate is
equal to the ratio between the weight of the aggregate and the sum of
the weights of the competing aggregates. The packet delay guaranteed
to the aggregate is instead inversely proportional to the guaranteed
bandwidth. By using the maximum possible value, and not the actual
value of the weight sum, QFQ+ provides each aggregate with the worst
possible service guarantees, and not with service guarantees related
to the actual set of competing aggregates. To see the consequences of
this fact, consider the following simple example.
Suppose that only the following aggregates are backlogged, i.e., that
only the classes in the following aggregates have packets to transmit:
one aggregate with weight 10, say A, and ten aggregates with weight 1,
say B1, B2, ..., B10. In particular, suppose that these aggregates are
always backlogged. Given the weight distribution, the smoothest and
fairest service order would be:
A B1 A B2 A B3 A B4 A B5 A B6 A B7 A B8 A B9 A B10 A B1 A B2 ...
QFQ+ would provide exactly this optimal service if it used the actual
value for the weight sum instead of the maximum possible value, i.e.,
11 instead of 2^10. In contrast, since QFQ+ uses the latter value, it
serves aggregates as follows (easy to prove and to reproduce
experimentally):
A B1 B2 B3 B4 B5 B6 B7 B8 B9 B10 A A A A A A A A A A B1 B2 ... B10 A A ...
By replacing 10 with N in the above example, and by increasing N, one
can increase at will the maximum packet delay and the jitter
experienced by the classes in aggregate A.
This patch addresses this issue by just using the above
'instantaneous' value of the weight sum, instead of the maximum
possible value, when updating the system virtual time. After the
instantaneous weight sum is decreased, QFQ+ may deviate from the ideal
service for a time interval in the order of the time to serve one
maximum-size packet for each backlogged class. The worst-case extent
of the deviation exhibited by QFQ+ during this time interval [1] is
basically the same as of the deviation described above (but, without
this patch, QFQ+ suffers from such a deviation all the time). Finally,
this patch modifies the comment to the function qfq_slot_insert, to
make it coherent with the fact that the weight sum used by QFQ+ can
now be lower than the maximum possible value.
[1] P. Valente, "Extending WF2Q+ to support a dynamic traffic mix",
Proceedings of AAA-IDEA'05, June 2005.
Signed-off-by: Paolo Valente <paolo.valente@unimore.it>
Signed-off-by: David S. Miller <davem@davemloft.net>
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