Buffer management for aggregated streaming data with packet dependencies

In many applications the traffic traversing the network has inter-packet dependencies due to application-level encoding schemes. For some applications, e.g., multimedia streaming, dropping a single packet may render useless the delivery of a whole sequence. In such environments, the algorithm used to decide which packet to drop in case of buffer overflows must be carefully designed, to avoid goodput degradation. We present a model that captures such inter-packet dependencies, and design algorithms for performing packet discards. Traffic consists of an aggregation of multiple streams, each of which consists of a sequence of inter-dependent packets. We provide two guidelines for designing buffer management algorithms for this problem, and demonstrate the effectiveness of these criteria. We devise an algorithm according to these guidelines and evaluate its performance analytically, using competitive analysis. We also present a simulation study that shows that the performance of our algorithm is within a small fraction of the performance of the best offline algorithm.