Coordinated aggregate scheduling for improving end-to-end delay performance

This paper proposes a novel coordinated aggregate scheduling (CAS) algorithm that combines both EOF (earliest-deadline-first) scheduling and rate-based fair queueing. CAS uses guaranteed rate (GR) scheduling (Goyal, P et al., 1995) for traffic aggregates at the inter-aggregate level, but employs EDF-like scheduling at the intra-aggregate level. Computation of the deadline D_N of a packet at an intermediate node N is coordinated between the node N and its upstream nodes, and D_N is related to the packet's guaranteed rate clock (GRC) value at the flow-aggregation node. CAS provides tighter end-to-end (e2e) delay bounds than the "vanilla" GR aggregate scheduling that relies on FIFO queueing within an aggregate. Our in-depth simulation results demonstrate CAS's superior performance. Moreover, as an aggregate-based work-conserving scheduling algorithm, CAS incurs lower scheduling and state-maintenance overheads at routers than per-flow scheduling. These salient features make CAS very attractive for use in Internet core networks.