A new approach to Service Differentiation: Non-Congestive Queueing

We evaluate a new approach to service differentiation, based on distinguishing congestive and non-congestive data. We initially define as non-congestive data only minimal-size packets, which do not contribute to congestion themselves, but, however, do suffer delays caused by larger packets. Case examples of such data are typical sensor data. Non-Congestive Queuing (NCQ) needs not follow a state-full approach to traffic differentiation. We show that (i) non congestive data gets a much better service from the network, (ii) congestive data suffers no extra delays; instead, both fairness and efficiency are occasionally improved due to lower contention. Having more flows finishing early may lead to better resource sharing.