  Scheduling and managing queues with bounded buffers are among the most
fundamental problems in computer networking. Traditionally, it is often assumed
that all the properties of each packet are known immediately upon arrival.
However, as traffic becomes increasingly heterogeneous and complex, such
assumptions are in many cases invalid. In particular, in various scenarios
information about packet characteristics becomes available only after the
packet has undergone some initial processing. In this work, we study the
problem of managing queues with limited knowledge. We start by showing lower
bounds on the competitive ratio of any algorithm in such settings. Next, we use
the insight obtained from these bounds to identify several algorithmic concepts
appropriate for the problem, and use these guidelines to design a concrete
algorithmic framework. We analyze the performance of our proposed algorithm,
and further show how it can be implemented in various settings, which differ by
the type and nature of the unknown information. We further validate our results
and algorithmic approach by a simulation study that provides further insights
as to our algorithmic design principles in face of limited knowledge.
