UC San Diego

Many ideas for adding innovative functionalities to networks require either modifying packets or performing alternative queuing to packets in flight on the data- plane. Modifications to existing network is difficult and often faced with hindrance like ease of deployability and ability to test with production-like traffic. NetBump is a platform for experimenting, evaluating and deploying these ideas with minimal intrusiveness, while leaving the switches and endhosts unmodified. In this thesis, we evaluate TCP packet pacing as an application over NetBump. We propose a modified token bucket implementation which accurately estimates the token requirement for sustained well-paced TCP flow, thus smoothing the bursty behavior. We were able to able to monitor various crucial features of the TCP flow and take informed decisions to pace the out going flow. Finally, we perform micro-benchmarks to see the effect of pacing. In general, our packet pacer implementations reduces the number of buffer overflows. Specifically, the modified token bucket implementation performs the best with zero buffer overflows