Operating ranges, tunability and performance of CoDel and PIE

Bufferbloat is excessive delay due to the accumulation of packets in a router's oversized queues. CoDel and PIE are two recent Active Queue Management (AQM) algorithms that have been proposed to address bufferbloat by reducing the queuing delay while trying to maintain a high bottleneck utilization. This paper fills a gap by outlining what are the operating ranges, that is the network characteristics (in terms of round-trip times and bottleneck capacity), for which these algorithms achieve their design goals. This new approach to the problem lets us identify deployment scenarios where both AQM schemes result in poor performance when used with default parameters. Because PIE and CoDel have been proposed with RED's deployment issues in mind, it was essential to evaluate to what extent we can tune them to achieve various trade-offs and let them control the queuing delay outside their default operating range. We find that, by appropriate tuning (1) the amount of buffering can easily be controlled with PIE, (2) the Round Trip Time (RTT) sensitivity of CoDel can be reduced. Also, we observe there is more correlation between the congestion level, the achieved queuing delay and the targeted delay with CoDel than with PIE. This paper therefore concludes there is no single overall best AQM scheme, as each scheme proposes a specific trade-off.