Bounded tag fair queueing for broadband packet switching networks

Abstract

Fair Queueing (FQ) is an attractive packet scheduling mechanism, which can establish firewall among packet flows. Thus, the quality of service (QoS) of each flow can be guaranteed. To implement the mechanism, three important performance issues are concerned: fairness, bounded delay, and efficiency. We propose a scheme, named BTFQ, which satisfies the three criteria. The scheme BTFQ + is also proposed to improve the fairness property of BTFQ and is designed to combine with a low-cost, high-speed hardware for reducing computation time. For comparison, we classify some well-known packet scheduling schemes into six classes according to their fairness properties. BTFQ and BTFQ + are excellent in bounded delay and efficiency. Their fairness properties, although a little bit weak, are but still very good if the traffic load is under 95%, according to the simulation results. Because of the tradeoff among the performance issues, BTFQ and BTFQ + provide another good choices. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.