Improving the flexibility of the deficit table scheduler

Abstract

A key component for networks with Quality of Service (QoS) support is the egress link scheduler. The table-based schedulers are simple to implement and can offer good latency bounds. Some of the latest proposals of network technologies, like Advanced Switching and InfiniBand, define in their specifications one of these schedulers. However, these schedulers do not work properly with variable packet sizes and face the problem of bounding the bandwidth and latency assignments. We have proposed a new table-based scheduler, the Deficit Table (DTable) scheduler, that works properly with variable packet sizes. Moreover, we have proposed a methodology to configure this table-based scheduler that partially decouples the bandwidth and latency assignments. In this paper we propose a method to improve the flexibility of the decoupling methodology. Moreover, we compare the latency performance of this strategy with two well-known scheduling algorithms: the Self-Clocked Weighted Fair Queuing (SCFQ) and the Deficit Round Robin (DRR) algorithms. © 2006 Springer-Verlag.