Frame-based priority scheduling in hybrid IP/ATM networks

The exploding growth of World Wide Web applications in recent years has overwhelmed the internet with multimedia traffic. A future performance concern is to keep pace with the quickly growing bandwidth requirements. IP over ATM is a way to relax such requirements. It provides a hybrid approach to support both layer 3 software forwarding and layer 2 ATM hardware switching. A switched virtual connection may be suitable for traffic involving large data transfers and QoS provision like Guarantee Service (GS) applications. In the hybrid IP/ATM networks, the packet-level instead of the cell-Level behavior is the relevant measure of performance. In this paper, we propose a so-called Frame-based Priority Scheduling (FBPS) algorithm far GS applications. FBPS focuses on the packet-level performance while transmitting based on cells. The most attractive feature of FBPS is its simplicity. We provide a systematic analysis of FBPS scheduler and derive the bound on its fairness when the how traffic is shaped by a leaky bucket. It shows that FBPS is competitive with certain complex scheduling disciplines such as PGPS. We also verify our analytical bounds by simulation. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.