The value of repeatable experiments and negative results: - a journey through the history and future of AQM and fair queuing algorithms.

Abstract

The Bufferbloat project was founded three and half years ago to explore solutions to why modern data networks became so slow when loaded. We set out to explore the literature, and code, from the earliest days of the Internet to today, to try and find out what had gone wrong, and to find ways to fix it. A result of that effort (so far!) has been a renaissance in interest in congestion control, and huge - orders of magnitude - improvements in network latency along the edge of the Internet, with deployable new algorithms and code. Surprisingly, we also made large improvements in simultaneous bidirectional goodput on asymmetric networks. This talk goes into the history and future of Active Queue Management (AQM) and fair queuing algorithms, touches upon current work across the field and tries to identify useful techniques for exploring and designing future work that can scale.