Quantum-Based Earliest Deadline First Scheduling for Multiservices

Abstract

Latency-rate (LR) schedulers have shown their ability in providing fair and weighted sharing of bandwidth with an upper bound on delivery latency of packets while earliest departure first (EDF) schedulers have shown their ability in providing LR-decoupled service whereby the delivery latency of packets is not bounded by the reserved rate. However, EDF schedulers require traffic shapers to ensure flow protection. We propose quantum-based earliest deadline first scheduling (QEDF), a quantum-based scheduler that provides flow protection, throughput guarantee and delay bound guarantee for flows that require LR-coupled and LR-decoupled types of reservations. It classifies flows into time-critical (TC), jitter-sensitive (JS), and rate-based (RB) classes and uses a quality-of-service forwarding rule to determine the next packet to be serviced by the scheduler. It provides nonpreemptive priority service to TC queues. This allows LR-decoupled reservation for flows that have a low rate and intolerable delay. Packets from JS queues can be delayed by other packets if forwarding the latter will not result in the former missing its deadline. As a quantum-based scheduler, the QEDF scheduler provides throughput guarantees for RB queues. We present both analytical and simulation results of QEDF, whereby we evaluated QEDF in its deployment as a single-class as well as a multiservice scheduler