Performance of a software router using AltQ/CBQ -: a measurement-based analysis

An AltQ-based software router, using CBQ as key building block, offers a flexible platform to provide service differentiation in the future Internet. This paper presents an experimental analysis of the actual performance and scheduling accuracy of an AltQ/CBQ-based software router, using a very precise hardware-based measuring technique. Our results show, that even though several jitter effects can be estimated very well in advance, they can become considerably large with only a small number of concurrent flows. Moreover, the forwarding performance of the test system is still not sufficient to handle a single Fast Ethernet link, which will lead to an unpredictable delay jitter.