Delivery of Guaranteed Rate Internet Traffic with Very Low Delay Jitter

Abstract

Telerobotic control systems can tolerate a fixed delay in the control loop, but are highly sensitive to delay jitter. Before such systems can be widely deployed over the Internet, packet switching techniques which ensure a high 'Quality of Service' (QoS) and low delay jitter will be required. It is shown that guaranteed-rate traffic flows can be delivered over the Internet backbone with very low delay jitter, provided that each IP router (and the destination playback buffer) have the capacity to buffer a small number of switch cells per flow. An RSVP or DiffServ algorithm must be used to reserve guaranteed bandwidth and buffer space in the IP routers. Each IP router must schedule the guaranteed rate traffic for transmission according to a recently proposed QoS switch scheduling algorithm, which exploits a Recursive Fair Stochastic Matrix Decomposition algorithm. Computer simulations illustrate that very low delay jitters can be achieved.