Priority Queues with Fractional Service for Tiered Delay QoS

Packet scheduling is key to quality of service (QoS) capabilities of broadband wired and wireless networks. In a heterogeneous traffic environment, a comprehensive QoS packet scheduler must strike a balance between flow fairness and access delay. Many advanced packet scheduling solutions have targeted fair bandwidth allocation while protecting delay-constrained traffic by adding priority queue(s) on top of a fair bandwidth scheduler. Priority queues are known to cause performance uncertainties and, thus, various modifications have been proposed. In this paper, we present a packet queueing engine dubbed Fractional Service Buffer (FSB), which, when coupled with a configurable flow scheduler, can achieve desired QoS objectives, such as fair throughputs and differentiated delay guarantees. Key performance metrics, such as delay limit and probability of delay limit violation, are derived as a function of key FSB parameters for each delay class in the packet queueing engine using diffusion approximations. OPNET simulations verify these analytical results.