Stephen Braithwaite

Implementation of Aqms on Linux Made Easy: the Creation of a Mice and Elephants Queuing Discipline for Linux Stephen Braithwaite

This dissertation not only explains how to build a custom linux networkqueuing discipline, but also documents the production and testing of a Mice andElephants queuing discipline and traffic policer that was needed forfor further evaluation of the Mice and Elephants strategy. It introducesthe Mice andElephants queueing strategy that can dramatically improve theresponsiveness of a network with little or no penalty to the overallthroughput. It further describes how the testing of these queuingdisciplines was carried out. It explains the basics of Linux queuing disciplines and ingressfilters, as well as the features of the existing queueing disciplinesand how to use those features to improve a network. Linux queuingdisciplines exist in the Linux kernel itself, and interactivedevelopment of the queuing discipline code within the kernel can betreacherous. This dissertation documents the uses of a queuingdiscipline development and test environment. It also documents themethod used to load test the queuing discipline, once it is fullyoperational in the kernel.