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.

ATM networks are connection-oriented. Making a call requires first sending a message to do an admission control to guarantee the connections' QoS (quality of service) in the network. In this paper, we focus on the problem of translating a global QoS requirement into a set of local QoS requirements in ATM networks. Usually, an end-user is only concerned with the QoS requirements on end-to-end basis and does not care about the local switching node QoS. Most of recent research efforts only focus on worst-case end-to-end delay bound but pay no attention to the problem of distributing the end-to-end delay bound to local switching node. After admission control, when the new connection is admitted to enter the network, they equally allocate the excess delay and reserve the same bandwidth at each switch along the path. But, this can not improve network utilization efficiently. It motivates us to design a novel local QoS requirement allocation scheme to get better performance. Using the number of maximum supportable connections as the performance index, we derive an optimal delay allocation (OPT) policy. In addition, we also proposed an analysis model to evaluate the proposed allocation scheme and equal allocation (EQ) scheme in a series of switching nodes with the Rate-controlled scheduling architecture, including a traffic shaper and a non-preemptive earliest-deadline-first scheduler. From the numerical results, we have shown the importance of allocation policy and explored the factors that affect the performance index.

Emerging multimedia technologies introduce the prevalent multicast transmission, and the multicast tree is determined using the time-invariant network parameters. This paper addresses the time-varying multicast tree problem and presents path selection heuristics for multicast routing to determine an alternative path for real-time applications. A network is partitioned into the optimal region, the disjoint region, and the edge cutset if a branch of the multicast tree meets the un-guaranteed QoS condition. The path selection heuristics operate during the multicast session phase to efficiently select an alternative routing path containing an edge in the edge cutset to connect the multicast tree again. The source-based heuristics PS-SPT finds the path for minimal source-to-destination delay and the sharing-based heuristics PS-DDMC for minimal total cost. These path selection heuristics can efficiently provide solutions to keep the multicast transmission reliable. Simulation results also show that the proposed heuristics can provide effective good solutions for real-time multicast transmission. PS-SPT can select a path with optimal source-to-destination delay and PS-DDMC can select a path with optimal total cost.

This paper deals with deadlock and fairness issues that may arise when network users request resources for guaranteed service with the resource reservation protocol (RSVP). A deadlock occurs when a request can only be satisfied if the resources reserved for another request are released, but the reserved resources are never released. The fairness issue occurs when some reservation requests may be satisfied but only after a very long wait. Our approach to these issues is based on our belief that a network should provide stable throughput and fairness whatever the behavior of the user. Our methods are unique in two respects. First, during the session setup phase, a node directly connected to the requesting users terminates the users' behavior and makes reservations fairly and efficiently in place of the users. Second, our three admission control methods allocate resources for each reservation request by considering not only the current residual bandwidth but also the properties of the requesting session; e.g., its weight (the number of resources it requires) or its age (how long it has been waiting for session setup). Our methods do not maximize the throughput since they always keep a certain amount of resources unreserved for fairness. From simulation results, however, they do provide quite fair behavior, and their throughput is stable regardless of the network size and the session holding time.