Managing performance using weighted round-robin

Over the next few years, IP networks will evolve from today's best-effort Internet into multi-class networks supporting quality of service requirements of diverse applications. This paper addresses one of the challenges of these new IP networks: how to set control parameters to deliver differentiated performance. We study this problem in a simplified setup of a single link and a weighted round robin queueing discipline. After giving an exact formulation of the problem, we apply an approximation of the waiting times to gain insight into the feasible performance and behavior of service limits as a function of the traffic parameters. The methodology is illustrated with several numerical examples.