On a packet scheduling mechanism for supporting delay sensitive applications on high speed networks

Supporting delay-sensitive applications over packet switched networks is a major challenge in networking. Packet scheduling is one of the mechanisms to be employed for this purpose in the network nodes (routers and switches) in a high-speed networking environment. In this paper we propose a new time-based packet scheduling algorithm. Our algorithm calculates and keeps an index for each flow in order to keep track of instantaneous bursts. With this approach, packet drops from queues of flows with small bandwidth shares can be partly prevented. Our algorithm can be considered as a slightly complicated version of WRR with improved delay characteristics. We first give an overview of packet scheduling and next describe the operation of our algorithm. We then provide preliminary simulation results showing the delay performance of the proposed algorithm under various traffic loads and show that the proposed algorithm has a better delay performance.