Exact Admission Control for Networks with a Bounded Delay Service


Jorg Liebeherr
Dallas E. Wrege
Department of Computer Science
University of Virginia
Charlottesville, VA 22903

Domenico Ferrari
CRATOS
Universita Cattolica
Via Emilia Parmense, 84
I-29100 Piacenza, Italy

Abstract
To support the requirements for the transmission of continuous media, such as audio and video, multiservice packet-switching networks must provide service guarantees to connections, including guarantees on throughput, network delays, and network delay variations. For the most demanding applications, the network must offer a service which provides deterministically bounded delay guarantees, referred to as `bounded delay service'. The admission control functions in a network with a bounded delay service require `schedulability conditions' that detect violations of delay guarantees in a network switch. In this paper, exact schedulability conditions are presented for three packet scheduling methods: Earliest-Deadline-First (EDF), Static-Priority (SP), and a novel scheduling method, referred to as Rotating-Priority-Queues (RPQ). By characterizing the worst-case traffic with general subadditive functions, the presented schedulability conditions can be applied to a large class of traffic models. Examples, which include actual MPEG video traces, are presented to demonstrate the trade-offs involved in selecting a packet scheduling method for a bounded delay service.