Multi-Resource Round Robin: A low complexity packet scheduler with Dominant Resource Fairness

Middleboxes are widely deployed in today's enterprise networks. They perform a wide range of important network functions, including WAN optimizations, intrusion detection systems, network and application level firewalls, etc. Depending on the processing requirement of traffic, packet processing for different traffic flows may consume vastly different amounts of hardware resources (e.g., CPU and link bandwidth). Multi-resource fair queueing allows each traffic flow to receive a fair share of multiple middlebox resources. Previous schemes for multi-resource fair queueing, however, are expensive to implement at high speeds. Specifically, the time complexity to schedule a packet is O(log n), where n is the number of backlogged flows. In this paper, we design a new multi-resource fair queueing scheme that schedules packets in a way similar to Elastic Round Robin. Our scheme requires only O(1) work to schedule a packet and is simple enough to implement in practice. We show, both analytically and experimentally, that our queueing scheme achieves nearly perfect Dominant Resource Fairness.