Delivering relative differentiated services in future high-speed networks using hierarchical dynamic deficit round robin

With the increasing deployment of real-time audio/video services over the Internet, provision of quality of service (QoS) has attracted much attention. When the line rate of future networks upgrades to multi-terabits per second, if routers/switches intend to deliver differentiated services through packet scheduling, the reduction of computational overhead and elimination of bottleneck resulting from memory latency will both become important factors. In addition, the decrease of average queueing delay and provision of small delays for short packets are two further critical factors influencing the delivery of better QoS for real-time applications. The advanced waiting time priority (AWTP) is a timestamp-based packet scheduler which is enhanced from the well-known WTP. Although AWTP considers the effect of packet size, the latency resulting from timestamp access and a great quantity of computational overhead may result in bottlenecks for AWTP being deployed over high-speed links. Many existing schedulers have the same problems. We propose a multi-level hierarchical dynamic deficit round-robin (MLHDDRR) scheduling scheme which is enhanced from the existing dynamic deficit round-robin scheduler. The new scheme can resolve these issues and efficiently provide relative differentiated services under a variety of load conditions. Besides, MLHDDRR can also protect the highest priority traffic from significant performance degradation due to bursts of low-priority traffic. We compare the performance of AWTP with the proposed scheme. Extensive simulation results and complexity analysis are presented to illustrate the effectiveness and efficiency of MLHDDRR.