RISE Seminar 4/19/19: From Queues to Earliest Departure Time, a talk by David Wetherall

April 19, 2019

Title: From Queues to Earliest Departure Time

Speaker: David Wetherall

Affiliation: Google

Data and location: Friday, April 19, 12:30 – 1:30pm; Wozniak Lounge (430 Soda Hall)

Abstract: Queues are used heavily as the primitive in host networking stacks and

NICs to gate the transmission of packets into the network. They

specify time implicitly, draining packets into the network “as fast as

possible”. In this talk I will explain why we have come to favor a

model for using the network in which packet departure times are set

explicitly: it is a fit for the modern networking environment in which

hosts cannot rely on deep-buffered switches to absorb large bursts,

plus more efficient when implemented with constructs such as timing

wheels, and more flexible for expressing rich policies. This is work

by a set of Google folks working on host networking and congestion

control, notably Nandita Dukkipati, Eric Dumazet, Van Jacobson, and

Amin Vahdat

Bio: David Wetherall is a Principal Engineer at Google where he works on

bandwidth management systems at hosts, switches, and in the control

plane for datacenter, backbone, and Cloud networks. Previously he was

a Professor at the University of Washington for 15 years. He is a

Fellow of the ACM and IEEE, and co-author of “Computer Networks”. He

received his PhD from MIT and BE from the University of Western

Australia.