Improving Network Performance through Pacing

Speaker: Sinan Hanay

Faculty Host: Professor Kang Xi

Abstract
Network devices in the current Internet operate in a work-conserving fashion and always forward traffic as quickly as possible. While this approach intuitively seems to lead to high network performance, I show in my work that in some scenarios the opposite is true: intentionally delaying or slowing down transmissions can lead to higher network throughput and less energy consumption. In this talk, I will discuss how the use of our Queue Length Based Pacing technique can improve traffic characteristics, can reduce the drop rate in networks with small packet buffers (e.g., packet-switched optical networks), and can increase end-to-end throughput. Our prototype implementation of this pacing algorithm on the NetFPGA platform shows that this pacing can be implemented efficiently in hardware and does not require any changes in network protocols. The idea of pacing can also be applied to network links in order to reduce power consumption. I will briefly discuss our recent work that aims to reduce power consumption in Ethernet by dynamically adapting the transmission rate based on traffic conditions.

About the Speaker
Sinan Hanay received the B.S. in microelectronics from Sabanci University in 2005 and M.S. in electrical engineering from TOBB University of Economics and Technology, Turkey in 2007. He has been a Ph.D. student at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst since September 2007. His research interests include network systems design, green networking and TCP pacing.