Abstruet-The problem of allocating network resources to the users of an integrated services network is investigated in the context of rate-based flow control. The network is assumed to be a virtual circuiq comection-based packet network. We show that the use of Generalized processor Sharing (GPS), when combined with Leaky Bucket admission control, allows the network to make a wide range of worst-case performance guarantees on throughput and delay. The scheme is flexible in that d~erent users may be given widely different performance guarantees, and is efilcient in that each of the servers is work conserving. We present a practicat packet-by-packet service discipline, PGPS (first proposed by Deme5 Shenker, and Keshav [7] under the name of Weighted Fair Queueing), that closely approximates GPS. This altows us to relate ressdta for GPS to the packet-bypacket scheme in a precise manner. In this paper, the performance of a single-server GPS system is analyzed exactty from the standpoint of worst-case packet delay and burstiness when the sources are constrained by leaky buckets. The worst-case sewdon backlogs are also determined. In the sequel to this paper, these results are extended to arbitrary topology networks with multiple nodes. I.

Existing approaches for providing guaranteed services require routers to manage per ow states and perform per ow operations [9, 21]. Such a stateful network architecture is less scalable and robust than stateless network architectures like the original IP and the recently proposed Di serv [3]. However, services provided with current stateless solutions, Di serv included, have lower exibility, utilization, and/or assurance level as compared to the services that can be provided with per ow mechanisms. In this paper, we propose techniques that do not require per ow management (either control or data planes) at core routers, but can implement guaranteed services with levels of exibility, utilization, and assurance similar to those that can be provided with per ow mechanisms. In this way we can simultaneously achieve high quality of service, high scalability and robustness. The key technique we use is called Dynamic Packet State (DPS), which provides a lightweight and robust mechanism for routers to coordinate actions and implement distributed algorithms. We present an implementation of the proposed algorithms that has minimum incompatibility with IPv4.

Router mechanisms designed to achieve fair bandwidth allocations, like Fair Queueing, have many desirable properties for congestion control in the Internet. However, such mechanisms usually need to maintain state, manage buffers, and/or perform packet scheduling on a per flow basis, and this complexity may prevent them from being cost-effectively implemented and widely deployed. In this paper, we propose an architecture that significantly reduces this implementation complexity yet still achieves approximately fair bandwidth allocations. We apply this approach to an island of routers -- that is, a contiguous region of the network -- and we distinguish between edge routers and core routers. Edge routers maintain per flow state; they estimate the incoming rate of each flow and insert a label into each packet header based on this estimate. Core routers maintain no per flow state; they use FIFO packet scheduling augmented by a probabilistic dropping algorithm that uses the packet labels an...

The dramatically increased bandwidths and processing capabilities of future high-speed networks make possible many distributed real-time applications, such as sensor-based applications and multimedia services. Since these applications will have traffic characteristics and performance requirements that differ dramatically from those of current data-oriented applications, new communication network architectures and protocols will be required. In this paper we discuss the performance requirements and traffic characteristics of various real-time applications, survey recent developments in the areas of network architecture and protocols for supporting real-time services, and develop frameworks in which these, and future, research efforts can be considered.

. This paper is motivated by the need to provide per session quality of service guarantees in fast packet-switched networks. We address the problem of characterizing and designing scheduling policies that are optimal in the sense of minimizing buffer and/or delay requirements under the assumption of commonly accepted traffic constraints. We investigate buffer requirements under three typical memory allocation mechanisms which represent trade-offs between efficiency and complexity. For traffic with delay constraints we provide policies that are optimal in the sense of satisfying the constraints if they are satisfiable by any policy. We also investigate the trade-off between delay and buffer optimality, and design policies that are "good" (optimal or close to) for both. Finally, we extend our results to the case of "soft" delay constraints and address the issue of designing policies that satisfy such constraints in a fair manner. Given our focus on packet switching, we mainly concern our...

With the transformation of the Internet into a commercial infrastructure, the ability to provide differentiated services to users with widely varying requirements is rapidly becoming as important as meeting the massive increases in bandwidth demand. Hence, while deploying routers, switches, and transmission systems of ever increasing capacity, Internet service providers would also like to provide customer-specific differentiated services using the same shared network infrastructure. In this article, we describe router architectures that can support the two trends of rising bandwidth demand and rising demand for differentiated services. We focus on router mechanisms that can support differentiated services at a level not contemplated in proposals currently under consideration due to concern regarding their implementability at high speeds. We consider the types of differentiated services that service providers may want to offer and then discuss the mechanisms needed in routers to support them. We describe plausible implementations of these mechanisms (the scalability and performance of which have been demonstrated by implementation in a prototype system) and argue that it is

Ž. In this paper, we review the basic mechanisms used in packet networks to support Quality-of-Service QoS guarantees. We outline the various approaches that have been proposed, and discuss some of the trade-offs they involve. Specifically, the paper starts by introducing the different scheduling and buffer management mechanisms that can be used to provide service differentiation in packet networks. The aim is not to provide an exhaustive review of existing mechanisms, but instead to give the reader a perspective on the range of options available and the associated trade-off between performance, functionality, and complexity. This is then followed by a discussion on the use of such mechanisms to provide specific end-to-end performance guarantees. The emphasis of this second part is on the need for adapting mechanisms to the different environments where they are to be deployed. In particular, fine grain buffer management and scheduling mechanisms may be neither necessary nor cost effective in high speed backbones, where ‘‘aggregate’ ’ solutions are more appropriate. The paper discusses issues and possible approaches to allow coexistence of different mechanisms in delivering end-to-end

This paper is principally concerned with resource allocation for connections tolerating statistical qualityof service #QoS# guarantees in a public wide-area ATM network. Our aim is to sketch a framework, based on e#ective bandwidths, for call admission schemes that are sensitivetoindividual QoS requirements and account for statistical multiplexing. We begin by describing recent results approximating the e#ective bandwidth required by heterogeneous streams sharing bu#ered links, including results for the packetized generalized processor sharing service discipline. Extensions to networks follow via the concept of decoupling bandwidths - motivated by a study of the input-output properties of queues. Based on these results we claim that networks with su#cient routing diversity will inherently satisfy nodal decoupling. We then discuss on-line methods for estimating the e#ective bandwidth of a connection. Using this type of tra#c monitoring we propose an approach to usage parameter ...

We consider large buffer asymptotics for feed-forward networks of discrete-time queues with deterministic service rate shared by multiple classes of streams subject to work conserving service policies. First we review the concept of effective bandwidths for traffic streams sharing a common buffer subject to subject to tail constraints on the workload distribution. Next, we obtain the effective bandwidth of the departure process from such a queue, proving that in fact the effective bandwidth of the output is at worst equal to that of the input, and depending on the service rate, strictly less than that of the input. We then define the notion of a decoupling bandwidth and the associated constraints, guaranteeing that asymptotics within the network are decoupled. These results provide a framework for call admission schemes which are sensitive to constraints on the tail distribution of the workload or approximate cell loss probabilities. Our results require relatively weak assumptions on both the traffic streams and service policies. We consider the problem of “optimal ” traffic shaping (via buffering) subject to a loss constraint. Finally, we discuss our results in the context of resource management for ATM networks. 1

Network services for the most demanding advanced networked applications which require absolute, per-flow service assurances can be deterministic or statistical. By exploiting statistical properties of traffic, statistical assurances can extract more capacity from a network than deterministic assurances. In this work we consider statistical service assurances for traffic scheduling algorithms. We present functions, so-called effective envelopes, which are, with high certainty, upper bounds of multiplexed traffic. Effective envelopes can be used to obtain bounds on the amount of traffic on a link that can be provisioned with statistical service assurances. We show that our bounds can be applied to a variety of packet scheduling algorithms. In fact, one can reuse existing admission control functions for scheduling algorithms with deterministic assurances. We present numerical examples which compare the number of ows with statistical assurances that can be admitted with our effective envelope approach to those achieved with existing methods.