Weighted fair queuing with differential dropping

Weighted fair queuing (WFQ) allows Internet operators to define traffic classes and then assign different bandwidth proportions to these classes. Unfortunately, the complexity of efficiently allocating the buffer space to each traffic class turns out to be overwhelming, leading most operators to vastly overprovision buffering-resulting in a large resource footprint. A single buffer for all traffic classes would be preferred due to its simplicity and ease of management. Our work is inspired by the approximate differential dropping scheme but differs substantially in the flow identification and packet dropping strategies. Augmented with our novel differential dropping scheme, a shared buffer WFQ performs as well or better than the original WFQ implementation under varied traffic loads with a vastly reduced resource footprint.