Buffer Management for Aggregated Streaming Data with Packet Dependencies

In many applications, the traffic traversing the network has interpacket dependencies due to application-level encoding schemes. For some applications, e.g., multimedia streaming, dropping a single packet may render useless the delivery of a whole sequence. In such environments, the algorithm used to decide which packet to drop in case of buffer overflows must be carefully designed, to avoid goodput degradation. We present a model that captures such interpacket dependencies, and design algorithms for performing packet discard. Traffic consists of an aggregation of multiple streams, each of which consists of a sequence of interdependent packets. We provide two guidelines for designing buffer management algorithms, and demonstrate their effectiveness. We devise an algorithm according to these guidelines and evaluate its performance analytically, using competitive analysis. We also perform a simulation study that shows that the performance of our algorithm is within a small fraction of the performance of the best known offline algorithm.