Lecture 05

Queuing Delay

• Queuing delay is most complicated and interested delay as

compared to other components of nodal delay (processing,
transmission, propagation)

• Queuing delay can vary from packet to packet

– Example: if ten packets arrive at an empty queue, the first

packet will suffer no queuing delay while the last packet
will suffer large queuing delay.

• Queuing delay depends on:

– Average Rate at which the packets arrives at a queue

(a = packets/sec)

– Transmission Rate of the link (R = bits/sec)

– Nature of the incoming traffic (bursty/periodic)

– Assume that all the packets are of equal length say L bits

– Then the average rate at which the bits arrive at the queue
will be La bits/sec

• Traffic Intensity = La/R

– This ratio helps in estimating the extent of queuing delay.

 Traffic Intensity

• Traffic Intensity

– If La/R is > 1

• It means that the average rate at which the bits arrive

at the queue exceeds the rate at which the bits can be
transmitted from the queue.

• In this undesirable situation, the queue will tend to

increase without bound and the queuing delay will
reach to infinity!

– A golden rule in traffic engineering

• “Design your systems so that the traffic intensity is no

greater than 1s”

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• Traffic Intensity

– If La/R is > 1
• If the traffic intensity is close to one, there will be intervals of
time when the arrival rate exceeds the transmission capacity
and a queue will form.

• As the traffic intensity approaches 1, the average queue length

gets larger and larger

– If La/R is < 1
• If the traffic intensity is close to zero, then the packets arrivals
are few and far between, and it is unlikely that an arriving
packet will find another packet in the queue.

• Average queuing delay will be close to zero.

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Packet Loss
• In reality a queue has a finite capacity.

• As the traffic intensity approaches 1, a packet can arrive to find a full

queue.

• With no place to store such a packet, a router will drop that packet; that is
the packet will be lost.

• The fraction(Part /Hissa) of lost packets increases as the traffic intensity

increases.

• Thus, a node performance also includes the probability(chance of

occurrence) of packet loss.

• A lost packet may be retransmitted on an end-to-end basis, either the

application or transport layer protocol.
 End-to-End Delay
• The total delay from source to destination is referred to as end-to-end
delay

– Example:

• Suppose that the queuing delay is negligible as the network is

uncongested, then the end-to-end delay between the source
and destination having N-1 routers in between will be:

dend-end = N (dproc + dtrans + dprop )

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Delays and Routes in the Internet

• Traceroute

– A program that sends multiple special packets towards the

destination

– As these packets work their way towards the destination, they pass
through a series of routers.

– When a router receives one of these special packets, it sends a short

message back to the source.

– This message contains the name and address of the router.