Buffer management and delivery latency in various networks have been extensively studied. However, little work has considered the condition in which the traffic exhibits interpacket dependency, a common occurrence with many applications. Furthermore, the existing work related to such traffic mainly focuses on maximizing goodput and little attention has been paid to delivery latency. This paper concentrates on the delivery latency minimization problem for streaming data with packet dependencies. A novel optimization model is proposed to describe the aforementioned problem and the theoretical lower bound for delivery latency is deduced. Based on this model, a plain buffer management (PBM) algorithm is applied to the implementation of the buffer scheduling process. Afterwards, we improve the PBM algorithm under the guidance of a heuristic idea and put forward an optimal buffer management greedy (OBMG) algorithm. Experiments demonstrate that the OBMG algorithm outperforms the currently best known online (BKO) algorithm as it decreases the average delivery latency by 35.6%. In some cases, delivery latency obtained from the OBMG algorithm can be quite close to the theoretical lower bound. In addition, the OBMG algorithm can reduce CPU computational overhead by more than 12% in comparison to the BKO algorithm.

Software-defined networking (SDN) decouples the control and forwarding of network devices, providing benefits such as simplified control. However, due to cost constraints and other factors, SDN is difficult to fully deploy. It has been proposed that SDN devices can be incrementally deployed in a traditional IP network, i.e., hybrid SDN, to provide partial SDN benefits. Studies have shown that better traffic engineering performance can be achieved by modifying the coverage and placement of SDN devices in hybrid SDN, because they can influence the behavior of legacy switches through certain strategies. However, it is difficult to develop and execute a traffic engineering strategy in hybrid SDN. This article proposes a routing algorithm to achieve approximate load balancing, which minimizes the maximum link utilization by using the optimal solution of linear programming and merging the minimum split traffic flows. A multipath forwarding mechanism under the same problem is designed to optimize transmission time. Experiments show that our algorithm has certain advantages in link utilization and transmission time compared to traditional distributed routing algorithms like OSPF and some hybrid SDN routing mechanisms. Furthermore, our algorithm can approximate the control effect of full SDN when the deployment rate of SDN devices is 40%.