Performance Evaluation of Resource Reservation Policies for Rate-Controlled Earliest-Deadline-First Scheduling in Multi-Service Packet Networks

The paper addresses the issue of reserving resources at packet switches along the path of flows requiring a deterministic bound on end-to-end delay. The switches are assumed to schedule outgoing packets using the Rate-Controlled Earliest-Deadline-First (RC-EDF) scheduling discipline. EDF is known to be an optimal scheduling discipline for deterministic delay services in the single scheduler case. We propose a number of static and dynamic reservation policies for mapping the end-to-end delay requirement of a flow into local delay deadlines to be reserved at each scheduler. These policies are based on non-even resource reservation where the resources reserved depend on the capacities and loading at each node in the network. We define and prove the optimality of a certain non-even policy for the case of a single path network with homogenous static traffic. We present extensive simulation results for different scenarios which show that dynamic non-even resource reservation provides superior performance when compared to simple policies such as even dividing of end-to-end delay among the schedulers.