Harmonic buffer management policy for shared memory switches

In this paper we consider shared-memory switches. We introduce a novel general nonpreemptive buffer management scheme, which considers the queues ordered by their size. We propose a new scheduling policy, based on our general scheme, which we call the Harmonic policy. We analyze the performance of the Harmonic policy by means of competitive analysis and demonstrate that its throughput competitive ratio is at most In(N) + 2, where N is the number of output ports. We also present a lower bound of Omega(logN/log logN) on the performance of any online deterministic policy. Our simulations also show that the Harmonic policy achieves high throughput and easily adapts to changing load conditions. (C) 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.