Abstract
In current networks, packet losses can occur if routers do not provide sufficiently large buffers. This paper studies how many buffers should be provided in a router to eliminate packet losses. We assume a network router has m incoming queues, each corresponding to a single traffic stream, and must schedule at any time on-line from which queue to take the next packet to send out. To exclude packet losses with a small amount of buffers, the maximum queue length must be kept low over the entire scheduling period. We call this new on-line problem the balanced scheduling problem (BSP). By competitive analysis, we measure the power of on-line scheduling algorithms to prevent packet losses. We show that a simple greedy algorithm is Θ(log m)-competitive which is asymptotically optimal, while Round-Robin scheduling is not better than m-competitive, as actually is any deterministic on-line algorithm for BSP. We also give a polynomial time algorithm for solving off-line BSP optimally. We also study another on-line balancing problem that tries to balance the delay among the m traffic streams.
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Fleischer, R., Koga, H. Balanced Scheduling toward Loss-Free Packet Queuing and Delay Fairness. Algorithmica 38, 363–376 (2004). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00453-003-1064-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00453-003-1064-z