Efficient, Real-World Token Bucket Configuration for Residential Gateways

Internet service providers should deploy effective active queue management (AQM) strategies to provide high-bandwidth low-latency access links to customers. However, they do not, and customers see high latencies, which are problematic for latency-sensitive applications (e.g., VoIP). As a result, customers have to deploy token buckets, but they are hard to configure. In this paper, we evaluate different token bucket configurations and find that the anecdotal evidence regarding token bucket configuration is not optimal. We analyze different configurations using the ns-2 simulator and find a formula to derive optimal parameters depending on the link bandwidth, which brings about much lower latency and higher throughput.