Service Disciplines for Guaranteed Performance Service in Packet-Switching Networks

While today’s computer networks support only best-effort service, future packet-switching integrated-services networks will have to support real-time communication services that allow clients to transport information with performance guarantees expressed in terms of delay, delay jitter, throughput, and loss rate. An important issue in providing guaranteed performance service is the choice of the packet service discipline at switching nodes. In this paper, we survey several service disciplines that are proposed in the literature to provide per-connection end-to-end peqormance guarantees in packet-switching networks. We describe their mechanisms, their similarities and differences, and the performance guarantees they can provide. Various issues and tradeoffs in designing service disciplines for guaranteed performance service are discussed, and a general framework for studying and comparing these disciplines are presented.