Cell-based schedulers with dual-rate grouping

The use of fluid Generalized Processor Sharing (GPS) algorithm for integrated service networks has received much attention since early 1990's because of its desirable properties in terms of delay bound and service fairness. Many Packet Fair Queuing (PFQ) algorithms have been developed to approximate GPS. However, owing to the implementation complexity, it is difficult to support a large number of sessions with diverse service rates while maintaining the GPS properties. The grouping architecture has been proposed to dramatically reduce the implementation complexity. However, the grouping architecture can only support a fixed number of service rates, thus causing the problems of granularity, bandwidth fairness, utilization, and immunity of flows. In this paper, we propose a new implementation approach called dual-rate grouping, which can significantly alleviate the above problems. Compared with the grouping architecture, the proposed approach possesses better performance in terms of approximating per session-based PFQ algorithms without increasing the implementation complexity.