A scheduling discipline and admission control policy for xunet 2

Abstract

Xunet 2 is a collaborative research program with a goal of understanding the fundamental issues in the performance of ATM networks. These networks are expected to carry a mixture of constant bit-rate traffic, variable bit-rate traffic and computer traffic spanning a wide range of performance requirements. This paper describes these service requirements and matches them with performance guarantees that can be provided by the scheduling discipline supported by an experimental ATM switch. The scheduler supports per-virtual-circuit queueing and several priorities of round robin service in order to segregate real-time and non-real-time traffic and provide fair sharing for bursty computer traffic. Detailed simulations show that real-time traffic can be efficiently integrated with non-real-time traffic using appropriate call admission policies and enhancements to traditional round robin scheduling. While the present study focuses on providing quality of service guarantees in the Xunet 2 network, the design of the scheduler and the call admission policies are relevant to ATM networks in general.