Rate-Controlled Service Disciplines

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 buuer 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 exibility in the allocation of bandwidths and delay bounds to diierent connections.