On the Performance Improvement Achieved by Packet Dispersion

This paper analytically studies performance improvement achieved by packet dispersion. Contrary to the previous work on packet dispersion, we consider the tail distribution of queue length and that of packet delay as performance measures, and we model a packet network as multiple parallel queues where the arrival processes from sources are not renewal but highly bursty. To appropriately evaluate the performance improvement achieved by packet dispersion, we develop approximate formulas to estimate the tail distributions. Our approximate formulas yield more accurate estimations than the standard approximate formulas. In the numerical results, we observe that packet dispersion can greatly improve the delay performance of packets. We also see that packet-level load balancing is superior to flow-level load balancing for any distribution ratio. key words: packet dispersion, load balancing, QoS, delay performance