Among the many scheduling algorithms which can guarantee delay bounds of sessions, the EDF scheduler with regulators has received wide attention since it can admit a very high number of sessions. However, due to regulators, EDF with regulators has difficulty in scalable implementation. To implement a regulator, a buffer and a timer are needed to restrict the incoming traffics. Given N number of sessions, N regulators are required. Moreover, due to regulators, the entire scheduling algorithm is not work-conserving. To enforce work-conserveness, it is known in the literature that additional buffers and a complex mechanism are required to bypass regulators. Thus, scalable implementation becomes much more difficult in the case of the work-conserving EDF with regulators. In this paper, however, we show that the buffers and timers used to implement regulators are unnecessary to guarantee delay bounds of admitted sessions in fixed-sized packet networks. Then, we can remove those unnecessary buffers and timers. By the removal, the resulting scheduling algorithm can be implemented in a scalable way and becomes work-conserving for free.

In order for a service discipline to be used for guaranteed service networks at very high speed, its overall implementation must be scalable while it provides as wide a network schedulability region as possible. From this point of view, GPS-based service disciplines provide a narrow network schedulability region while EDF-based disciplines suffer from the implementation complexities of rate-controllers and admission control. Alternatively, although service disciplines based on service-curves can provide a wider network schedulability region than GPS-based and EDF-based disciplines, they may have even worse implementation complexities than EDF-based disciplines. In this paper, we propose to employ a service discipline based on our specific service-curves. We show that our service discipline has comparable implementation complexity to GPS-based disciplines while providing the same wide network schedulability region that EDF-based disciplines can provide. In fact, this service discipline is an SCED service discipline proposed in [14]. However, our specific service-curves provide the SCED service discipline with the same network schedulability region that EDF-based disciplines can provide, O(1) complexity for deadline calculation, and O(N) complexity for admission control where N is the number of sessions.