Achieving Quality of Service via packet distribution shaping

Conventional Quality of Service (QoS) for multimedia networking applications are typically specified by a certain set of requirements on latency, jitter, bandwidth, and packet loss rate. In this paper, we introduce a novel approach to QoS via the notion of distribution shaping in which a pre-specified distribution of packets in a queue is achieved via queuing policies. In a way, the distribution-based QoS is more general since the distribution of packets in the queue captures all the statistical information regarding the throughput, latency, delay jitter, and packet loss rate. We present a convex optimization framework for obtaining the optimal queueing policy that drives any initial distribution of packets in the queue to the desired distribution in the fastest time. We then augment the proposed framework to obtain a queueing policy that produces ∈-approximation to the target distribution with even faster convergence time. The augmented framework is useful in dynamic settings where traffic statistics change frequently, and thus fast adaptation is preferable. Both simulation and theoretical results are provided to verify our approach.