Bufferbloat: Dark Buffers in the Internet

Abstract

Today’s networks are suffering from unnecessary latency and poor system performance. The culprit is bufferbloat, the existence of excessively large and frequently full buffers inside the network. Large buffers have been inserted all over the Internet without sufficient thought or testing. They damage or defeat the fundamental congestion-avoidance algorithms of the Internet’s most common transport protocol. Long delays from bufferbloat are frequently attributed incorrectly to network congestion, and this misinterpretation of the problem leads to the wrong solutions being proposed.