A Self-Clocked Fair Queueing Scheme for Broadband Applications

A n ef ic ient fa i r queueing scheme which is feasible f o r broadband implementation i s proposed and i ts performance i s analyzed. W e define fairness in a selfcontained manner, eliminating the need f o r the hypothetical fluid-flow reference sys tem used in the present state of art and thereby removing the associated computational complexity. The scheme i s based on the adoption of an internally generated virtual time as the index of work progress, hence the name self-clocked fair queueing. W e prove that the scheme possesses the desired fairness property and i s nearly optimal, in the sense that the maximum permissible disparity among the normalized services offered to the backlogged sessions is newer more than two t imes the corresponding figure in any packet-based queueing system.