Self-Clocked Round-Robin Packet Scheduling

Learn about a novel packet scheduling algorithm that addresses the limitations of Deficit Round Robin (DRR) in modern Internet traffic through this 16-minute conference presentation from NSDI '25. Discover how researchers from Johns Hopkins University, UC Riverside, and Hewlett Packard Labs identified critical shortcomings in DRR's assumptions about packet size distributions and traffic patterns, particularly its poor performance with varied packet sizes and short, latency-sensitive flows that dominate today's Internet. Explore the development of Self-Clocked Round-Robin Scheduling (SCRR), a parameter-less solution that maintains DRR's fairness and scalability advantages while significantly improving performance for short flows through intelligent virtual time adjustments. Examine the theoretical foundations and practical implementation results showing SCRR's ability to reduce CPU overhead by 23% compared to DRR with small quantum settings while improving application latency by 71% compared to DRR with large quantum configurations, all while preserving fair share guarantees across flows.