Sergey Nikolenko

“Buffer Management with Heterogeneous Processing”

Recent interest in geometric properties of networks has triggered research on embedding graphs on certain geometric spaces. Modern network processors (NPs) increasingly deal with packets that require heterogeneous processing. We consider the problem of managing a bounded size input queue buffer where each packet requires several rounds of processing before it can be transmitted out. The goal of admission control policies is to maximize the total number of successfully transmitted packets. We introduce a new class of policies (semi FIFO, with lazy policies being the most important innovation) that provides a new accounting infrastructure that makes it easier to prove upper bounds on the competitive ratio.