The service curve service discipline for the rate-controlled EDF service discipline in variable-sized packet networks

Guaranteed service will provide high quality services to real-time applications, e.g., audio or video, over packet networks such as the Internet. To support guaranteed service, a service discipline must guarantee a delay bound to each session. In addition, a preferred service discipline should achieve high network utilization and good scalability. The service disciplines studied so far have problems in achieving these two objectives at the same time. Generalized processor sharing (GPS) service disciplines can have low network utilization. Rate-controlled (RC) service disciplines have difficulty in scalability because of regulators. For service curve (SC) service disciplines, both the network utilization and the scalability depend on the adopted SC. To date, there have been no studies on an SC which can make an SC discipline achieve these two objectives. We propose a new service discipline based on SC service disciplines. The proposed discipline achieves these two goals in a variable-sized packet environment. We show that the discipline can achieve the network utilization achievable by the RC service disciplines. We further show that our SC requires O(1) complexity for deadline calculation. Different from the RC service disciplines, the SC service discipline with our SC does not need regulators at all. Thus, it has better scalability than the RC service disciplines and is work-conserving. We also show that the proposed SC makes SC service disciplines have strictly higher network utilization than the GPS service disciplines including the multi-rate service discipline.