Hierarchical relative error scheduler: an efficient traffic shaper for packet switching networks

Recently much attention has been dedicated to supporting real-time services for Integrated Services networks. This work frequently assumes the existence of traffic regulators at the entry to of inside the network. Yet, little attention has been dedicated to the design of efficient and scalable traffic shapers with stringent service guarantees assumed in the theoretical work. Even less work has addressed the issues of providing strict service guarantees when the bandwidth assignments of the flows change dynamically. In this paper we present a new scheduler which can be used as an efficient traffic shaper with deterministic bandwidth and delay guarantees which hold even in the presence of dynamic rate changes. Our scheduler supports variable packet size and arbitrary rate granularity.