Buffer De-Bloating

Buffers and their proper design are essential for the proper functioning of a network. One of its main purposes is to enable the interaction of two links or networks which operate at different data rates. Data bursts will occur and these will result in short periods of time where the rate at which the data is received is much larger than the rate at which the data can be sent. The buffer holds this received data until it can be processed to avoid it being lost and causing a re-transmission. Since memory has today become cheap, manufacturers have inadvertently overdone buffering in many devices. The problem is that while buffering reduces data loss, excessive buffering is resulting in high latency and reduced throughput when closed-loop transport protocols like TCP are used, since they rely on timely congestion notification (i.e. packet losses) to regulate their transmission speeds. Large buffers postpone the feedback of these congestion notifications from informing the transmitter to reduce its transmission rate, causing an increase in latency. This phenomenon is referred to as "bufferbloat", and is one of the main causes of latency on the Internet today.