PIE queue disc

This chapter describes the PIE ([Pan13], [Pan16]) queue disc implementation in ns-3.

Proportional Integral controller Enhanced (PIE) is a queuing discipline that aims to solve the bufferbloat [Buf14] problem. The model in ns-3 is a port of Preethi Natarajan’s ns-2 PIE model.

Model Description

The source code for the PIE model is located in the directory src/traffic-control/model and consists of 2 files pie-queue-disc.h and pie-queue-disc.cc defining a PieQueueDisc class. The code was ported to ns-3 by Mohit P. Tahiliani, Shravya K. S. and Smriti Murali based on ns-2 code implemented by Preethi Natarajan, Rong Pan, Chiara Piglione, Greg White and Takashi Hayakawa.

• class PieQueueDisc: This class implements the main PIE algorithm:
  • PieQueueDisc::DoEnqueue (): This routine checks whether the queue is full, and if so, drops the packets and records the number of drops due to queue overflow. If queue is not full, this routine calls PieQueueDisc::DropEarly(), and depending on the value returned, the incoming packet is either enqueued or dropped.
  • PieQueueDisc::DropEarly (): The decision to enqueue or drop the packet is taken by invoking this routine, which returns a boolean value; false indicates enqueue and true indicates drop.
  • PieQueueDisc::CalculateP (): This routine is called at a regular interval of m_tUpdate and updates the drop probability, which is required by PieQueueDisc::DropEarly()
  • PieQueueDisc::DoDequeue (): This routine calculates the average departure rate which is required for updating the drop probability in PieQueueDisc::CalculateP ()

References

[Pan13]

Pan, R., Natarajan, P., Piglione, C., Prabhu, M. S., Subramanian, V., Baker, F., & VerSteeg, B. (2013, July). PIE: A lightweight control scheme to address the bufferbloat problem. In High Performance Switching and Routing (HPSR), 2013 IEEE 14th International Conference on (pp. 148-155). IEEE. Available online at https://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/iccrg/current/pdfB57AZSheOH.pdf.

[Pan16]

Pan, P. Natarajan, F. Baker, G. White, B. VerSteeg, M.S. Prabhu, C. Piglione, V. Subramanian, Internet-Draft: PIE: A lightweight control scheme to address the bufferbloat problem, April 2016. Available online at https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-aqm-pie-07.

Attributes

The key attributes that the PieQueue class holds include the following:

• MaxSize: The maximum number of bytes or packets the queue can hold.
• MeanPktSize: Mean packet size in bytes. The default value is 1000 bytes.
• Tupdate: Time period to calculate drop probability. The default value is 30 ms.
• Supdate: Start time of the update timer. The default value is 0 ms.
• DequeueThreshold: Minimum queue size in bytes before dequeue rate is measured. The default value is 10000 bytes.
• QueueDelayReference: Desired queue delay. The default value is 20 ms.
• MaxBurstAllowance: Current max burst allowance in seconds before random drop. The default value is 0.1 seconds.
• A: Value of alpha. The default value is 0.125.
• B: Value of beta. The default value is 1.25.

Examples

The example for PIE is pie-example.cc located in src/traffic-control/examples. To run the file (the first invocation below shows the available command-line options):

$ ./waf --run "pie-example --PrintHelp"
$ ./waf --run "pie-example --writePcap=1"

The expected output from the previous commands are 10 .pcap files.

Validation

The PIE model is tested using PieQueueDiscTestSuite class defined in src/traffic-control/test/pie-queue-test-suite.cc. The suite includes 5 test cases:

• Test 1: simple enqueue/dequeue with defaults, no drops
• Test 2: more data with defaults, unforced drops but no forced drops
• Test 3: same as test 2, but with higher QueueDelayReference
• Test 4: same as test 2, but with reduced dequeue rate
• Test 5: same dequeue rate as test 4, but with higher Tupdate

The test suite can be run using the following commands:

$ ./waf configure --enable-examples --enable-tests
$ ./waf build
$ ./test.py -s pie-queue-disc

or

$ NS_LOG="PieQueueDisc" ./waf --run "test-runner --suite=pie-queue-disc"