Fair queuing for aggregated multiple links

Provisioning of a shared server with guarantees is an important scheduling task that has led to significant work in a number of areas including link scheduling. Fair Queuing algorithms provide a method for proportionally sharing a single server among competing flows, however, they do not address the problem of sharing multiple servers. Multiserver systems arise in a number of applications including link aggregation, multiprocessors and multi-path storage I/O. In this paper we introduce a new service discipline for multi-server systems that provides guarantees for competing flows. We prove that this new service discipline is a close approximation of the idealized Generalized Processor Sharing (GPS) discipline. We calculate its maximum packet delay and service discrepancy with respect to GPS. We also discuss its relevance to several applications, in particular, Ethernet link aggregation.