Pipelined sections: a new buffer management discipline for scalable QoS provision

The techniques used to provide quality of service in packet switched networks are buffer management and packet scheduling. The first line of defense against abusive flows that transmit excessive number of packets is the buffer manager. When the number of packets of a flow exceeds a threshold, new arrivals from that flow will be rejected. This threshold must be set to a level that is sufficiently high to provide specific guarantees to the flow and it must also be minimal so that the buffer manager will detect abusive behavior at the earliest possible moment. A buffer management technique that provides the same guarantees using a lower threshold will be more discriminating because it recognizes flow violations earlier. We present the new pipelined sections buffer management technique that is highly scalable and can provide rate guarantees to leaky bucket constrained flows using very low buffer reservations.