Active Queue Management with Data-Driven Delay Violation Probability Predictors

Abstract: The increasing demand for latency-sensitive applications has necessitated the development of sophisticated algorithms that efficiently manage packets with end-to-end delay targets traversing the networked infrastructure. Network components must consider minimizing the packets' end-to-end delay violation probabilities (DVP) as a guiding principle throughout the transmission path to ensure timely deliveries. Active queue management (AQM) schemes are commonly used to mitigate congestion by dropping packets and controlling queuing delay. Today's established AQM schemes are threshold-driven, identifying congestion and trigger packet dropping using a predefined criteria which is unaware of packets' DVPs. In this work, we propose a novel framework, Delta, that combines end-to-end delay characterization with AQM for minimizing DVP. In a queuing theoretic environment, we show that such a policy is feasible by utilizing a data-driven approach to predict the queued packets' DVPs. That enables Delta AQM to effectively handle links with arbitrary stationary service time processes. The implementation is described in detail, and its performance is evaluated and compared with state of the art AQM algorithms. Our results show the Delta outperforms current AQM schemes substantially, in particular in scenarios where high reliability, i.e. high quantiles of the tail latency distribution, are of interest.