Bandwidth scheduling for wide-area ATM networks using virtual finishing times

The paper is concerned with the design of a class of bandwidth scheduling policies that are suitable for public, wide-area asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) networks. The authors specify design goals for such strategies including ease of implementation and the ability to guarantee minimum bandwidths to individual buffers. Packetized generalized processor sharing is briefly discussed and a minimum bandwidth result for self-clocked fair queueing is given. The authors revisit an approach originally proposed by Zhang (1991) and prove that it is appropriate for ATM. Some novel, related approaches are described and analyzed.