Date of Award
4-20-2026
Document Type
Honors
Degree Name
General Beadle Honors Program
First Advisor
Dr. Pat Engebretson
Abstract
Packet scheduling is a well-studied topic in networking. It determines the order in which packets leave a congested output link and therefore affects delay, jitter, throughput, and packet loss. Prior research has shown that different schedulers offer different tradeoffs, but fewer studies have examined how scheduler performance changes under defined mixed-traffic workloads. The experiment uses NS-3 to simulate a congested network with multiple traffic types, including VoIP, gaming, HTTP, streaming, and bulk transfer, and compares FIFO, Strict Priority Queuing, and FQCoDel under varying traffic profiles and queue sizes. The results show that scheduler choice affects timing-sensitive traffic much more strongly than throughput-oriented traffic. VoIP and gaming exhibited large differences in tail delay and jitter across schedulers, while HTTP throughput often changed little and streaming and bulk throughput showed more mixed behavior. These findings indicate that scheduler effectiveness depends on workload composition and that no single scheduler is universally optimal across all traffic conditions.
Recommended Citation
Mohr, Landon, "The Impact of Traffic on Packet Schedulers within a Simulated Environment" (2026). Honors. 25.
https://scholar.dsu.edu/honors/25