Packet Scheduling in High-speed Networks Using Improved Weighted Round Robin

A variety of applications with different QoS requirements are supported simultaneously in the high-speed packet-switched networks, packet scheduling algorithms play a critical role in guaranteeing the performance of routing and switching devices. This study presents a simple, fair, efficient and easily implementary scheduling algorithm, called Successive Minimal-weight Round Robin (SMRR). In each round, SMRR provides the same service opportunity, which is equivalent to the minimal weight of the current round, for all active data flows. On the basis of the concept of Latency-Rate (LR) servers, we obtain the upper bound on the latency of SMRR and WRR (Weighted Round Robin) respectively and the results indicate that SMRR makes a significant improvement on the latency bound in comparison to WRR. We also discuss the fairness and implementation complexity of SMRR and the theoretical analysis shows that SMRR preserves the good implementation complexity of O (1) with respect to the number of flows and has better fairness than WRR.