Efficient fair queuing using deficit round-robin

Fair queuing is a technique that allows each flow passing through a network device to have a fair share of network resources. Previous schemes for fair queuing that achieved nearly perfect fairness were expensive to implement; specifically, the work required to process a packet in these schemes was O(log(n)), where n is the number of active flows. This is expensive at high speeds. On the other hand, cheaper approximations of fair queuing reported in the literature exhibit unfair behavior. In this paper, we describe a new approximation of fair queuing, that we call deficit round-robin. Our scheme achieves nearly perfect fairness in terms of throughput, requires only O(1) work to process a packet, and is simple enough to implement in hardware. Deficit round-robin is also applicable to other scheduling problems where servicing cannot be broken up into smaller units (such as load balancing) and to distributed queues.