Effect of scheduling jitter on end-to-end delay in TDMA protocols

We address the problem of guaranteeing end-to-end (ETE) delay of packets in a distributed system where the technique of time division multiple access (TDMA) is adopted, and the application at the destination node requires to process the packets at a regular rate. We present a time slot allocation algorithm to satisfy the transmission rate requirement, and to minimize the scheduling jitter. Each packet of a stream is delivered in an allocated time slot according to one of the two delivery protocols proposed. A worst case ETE delay bound is derived for each protocol. The performance of applying our scheduling algorithm to different delivery protocols is compared and evaluated via simulations.