Design and analysis of a congestion-free overlay on a high-speed network

Current designs of high-speed networks assume that all customers are tolerant of some amount of losses. However, it is possible that some applications may require very high reliability, and would be willing to pay more for it, if such a service were available. Motivated by this, we propose a design of a hybrid network which can guarantee zero cell loss probability for type 1 traffic while allowing some losses for type 2 traffic. This paper has three contributions. Our first contribution in this paper is to propose a service discipline (which can be implemented easily on a specific switch architecture) which guarantees zero losses for type 1 traffic. Our second contribution is to propose an algorithm for a scheduling strategy which reduces the number of buffers required at the output pods of the switches to zero for type 1 traffic. Our last contribution is to solve a difficult queueing problem involving service interruptions, which characterizes the performance of type 2 traffic.