Switching prioritized packets

The authors investigate methods of increasing the suitability of packet switching for time-critical, applications (for example, packet video or voice) and of specifying packets that can be discarded in the event of resource exhaustion. They introduce and expand the notion of packet priority and explore the suitability of a number of switch models for prioritization: input queuing, output queuing, input smoothing, and shared buffer approaches. Implementation issues for each of the models are also discussed, and sample implementations are given.<>