BShare: Packet Queueing Delay-Driven Buffer Sharing for Datacenter Switches

2026-05-22

AI Summary

As per-port bandwidth in data center switches continues to increase, traditional buffer-sharing strategies suffer from degraded performance and high complexity. This work proposes BShare, a lightweight, queueing-delay-based buffer-sharing mechanism that integrates buffer management with active queue management using only a single configurable parameter. By dynamically monitoring queueing delay to adjust buffer allocation in real time, BShare significantly simplifies policy design while maintaining compatibility with advanced transport protocols such as PowerTCP. Simulation results demonstrate that under burst-intensive workloads, BShare reduces flow completion time (FCT) by up to 45.07% compared to the ABM scheme.

Abstract

Modern datacenter switches share packet buffers across ports to boost overall throughput and reduce packet loss. However, as buffer availability per-port-per-bandwidth unit continues to decrease, existing buffer-sharing strategies face increasing performance challenges. Recent efforts have attempted to integrate Buffer Management (BM) with Active Queue Management (AQM) to harness the advantages of both BM and AQM approaches to improve performance. While these hybrid solutions show promise, their complexity of dynamically calculating multiple factors for integration hinders generalization and efficiency. This paper presents BShare, a simple buffer sharing mechanism that uses packet queueing delay. BShare requires only a single operator-configurable parameter. Our simulation results show that BSHARE improves the flow completion time (FCT) performance of advanced transport protocols, such as PowerTCP, by up to 45.07% compared to ABM, particularly under burst-heavy datacenter workloads.

Problem

• buffer sharing
• queueing delay
• datacenter switches
• flow completion time
• buffer management

Innovation

• buffer sharing
• queueing delay
• datacenter switches
• flow completion time
• active queue management