Homework #16 Solutions

cs349 -- Networks
Chapter 6
11) Consider a drop policy that drops the highest cost packet
in queue, where cost is the product of the size of the packet
and its expected remaining queue time.
a) What are the pros and cons of this policy?
Dropping large packets makes sense, because it might minimize
the _number_ of packets that get dropped.
Dropping packets with long expected queue delays makes sense,
since those packets were going to get delayed anyway.
So as heuristics go, this one is not unreasonable. On the
other hand, there is no reason to think that taking the product
of those two criteria is a particularly good way to combine
them.
Also, it might not be a good idea to pick on large packets,
since that means that applications with smaller packets might
not get the congestion message; they might just take up the
slack created by the big-packet applications.
b) Give an example of a sequence for which dropping the
highest-cost packet differs from dropping the largest
packet.
First in queue: big packet with zero remaining queue time.
Second in queue: small packet with any non-zero queue time.
c) Give an example where two packets exchange relative costs
as time progresses.
At time 0...
First: 100 bytes, 0 ms = 0 cost
Second: 100 bytes, 1 ms = 100 cost
Third:
1 byte , 2 ms = 2 cost
Later...
First: gone
Second: 100 bytes, 0 ms = 0 cost
Third:
1 byte , 1 ms = 1 cost
12) Telnet and ftp are competing for a router. Both applications
have packets in queue at all times. What is the relative
performance of the applications under the following queueing
policies:
a) round-robin
Both applications see similar delays, but ftp is getting much
higher throughput.

b) fair queueing
Telnet sends many small packets for every one of ftp's big packets.
The throughput is about the same for both, but the delays for telnet
are much smaller.
c) fair queueing with data bytes only
With headers out of the picture, the discrepancy between the
packets sizes is even greater, so the performance differences
seen by the applications are even more extreme.