A dynamic regulation and scheduling scheme for real-time traffic management

Typical rate-based traffic management schemes for real-time applications attempt to allocate resources by controlling the packet delivery to the resource arbitrator (scheduler). This control is typically based only on the characteristics of the particular (tagged) traffic stream and would fail to optimally adjust to non-nominal network conditions such as overload. In this paper, a dynamic regulation and scheduling (dynamic-R&S) scheme is proposed whose regulation function is modulated by both the tagged stream's characteristics and information capturing the state of the coexisting applications as provided by the scheduler. The performance of the proposed scheme-versus an equivalent static one-is investigated under both underload and overload traffic conditions. The substantially better throughput/jitter characteristics of the dynamic-R&S scheme are established.