Affiliations: Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, 1 Cyclotron Road, MS: 50B-2239, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA | Computer Science Division, University of California at Berkeley, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA
Note: [] This research was supported by the National Science Foundation and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) under Cooperative Agreement NCR-8919038 with the Corporation for National Research Initiatives by AT&T Bell Laboratories, Digital Equipment Corporation, Hitachi, Ltd., Pacific Bell, the University of California under a MICRO grant, and the International Computer Science Institute. The views and conclusions contained in this document are those of the authors, and should not be interpreted as representing official policies, either expressed or implied, of the U.S. Government or any of the sponsoring organizations.
Abstract: We propose a class of non-work-conserving service disciplines, called the rate-controlled service disciplines. When coupled with suitable admission control algorithms, rate-controlled service disciplines can provide end-to-end deterministic and statistical performance guarantees on a per-connection basis in an arbitrary-topology packet-switching network. The key feature of a rate-controlled service discipline is the separation of the server into two components: a rate controller and a scheduler. This separation makes it possible to obtain end-to-end performance characteristics by applying single node analysis at each switch. It also has several other distinct advantages: it decouples the allocation of bandwidths and delay bounds, uniformly distributes the allocation of buffer space inside the network to prevent packet loss, and allows arbitrary combinations of rate-control policies and packet scheduling policies. Rate-controlled service disciplines provide a general framework within which most of the existing non-work-conserving disciplines can be naturally expressed. One discipline in this class, called Rate-Controlled Static Priority (RCSP), is particularly suitable for providing performance guarantees in high-speed networks. It achieves simplicity of implementation as well as flexibility in the allocation of bandwidths and delay bounds to different connections.
