Rate-Controlled Service Disciplines
Hui Zhang, Domenico Ferrari · Journal of High Speed Networks · 1994
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.