Performance modelling and analysis of Deficit Round Robin scheduling scheme with self‐similar traffic

Abstract

AbstractThe provisioning of fairness to various network applications is an important Quality‐of‐Service demand and has thus become a challenging research issue in contemporary communication networks. Deficit Round Robin (DRR) is a promising fair scheduling mechanism owing to its low complexity and excellent ability of achieving a good degree of fairness in terms of throughput. On the other hand, self‐similar traffic was found to be pervasively present in communication networks and has great impact on the performance of scheduling systems. However, to the best of our knowledge, there has not been any analytical model reported in the open literature for the DRR mechanism in the presence of self‐similar traffic. To fill this gap, this paper analytically investigates the queueing performance of DRR and develops a new analytical model for deriving the upper and lower bounds of the queue length distributions of individual traffic flows in DRR scheduling systems subject to self‐similar traffic. Extensive comparison between simulation and analytical results validates the accuracy of the developed model. To demonstrate its applications, the analytical model is used to investigate the effects of packet size on the performance of the queueing system. The developed model is further applied to study the configuration of weights of individual traffic flows. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.