Scheduling with dynamic bandwidth allocation for DiffServ classes

The diverse service requirements of emerging Internet applications faster the need for flexible and scalable IP quality-of-service (QoS) schemes. Due to its simplicity and scalability, DiffServ is expected to be widely deployed across the Internet. Though DiffServ supporting scheduling algorithms for output-queueing (OQ) switches have been widely studied, there are few DiffServ scheduling algorithms for input-queueing (IQ) switches. In this paper, we propose the dynamic DiffServ scheduling (DDS) algorithm for IQ switches to provide dynamic bandwidth allocation for DiffServ classes. The basic idea of DDS is to schedule EF and AF traffic according to their minimum service rates with the reserved bandwidth and schedule AF and BE traffic fairly with the excess bandwidth. We evaluate the performance of DDS under bursty traffic arrivals and compare it with PQWRR, an existing scheduling algorithm suitable for supporting DiffServ for OQ switches. Simulations results show that DDS provides minimum bandwidth guarantees for EF and AF traffic and fair bandwidth allocation for BE traffic. DDS also achieves the delay and jitter performance for EF traffic close to that of PQWRR and the delay performance for AF traffic better than that of PQWRR at high loads. Using comparator-tree based arbitration components, it is feasible to implement DDS in hardware at high speed.