Fast Queuing Policies for Multimedia Applications

We present an analytical framework for providing Quality of Service (QoS) using queuing policies that achieves a given target distribution of packets in a network queue. To a large extent, the stationary distribution of packets in the queue resulted from employing a certain queuing policy directly controls the typical QoS metrics for multimedia applications. Therefore, using the packet distribution in the queue as the metric, the proposed framework allows for a more general and precise control of QoS beyond the standard metrics such as bandwidth, jitter, loss, and delay. Moreover, the proposed framework aims to find a fast queuing policy that achieves a given target stationary distribution. This fast adaptation is especially useful for multimedia applications in fast-changing network conditions. As an example, we present a general procedure for obtaining a queuing policy that optimizes for a given arbitrary objective along with the standard QoS requirements. Both theory and simulation results are presented to verify our framework.