SERVICE DISCIPLINES FOR GUARANTEED PERFORMANCE SERVICE IN PACKET-SWITCHING NETWORKS

While today's computer networks support only best-effort service, future packet-switching integrated-services networks will have to support real-time communcation services that allow clients to transport information with performance guarnatees expressed in terms of delay, delay jitter, throughput, and loss rate. An importnat issue in providing guraanteed performance service is the choice of the packet service discipline at wswithcing nodes. In this paper, we survey several service disciplines that are proposed in the literature to provide per-connection end-toend performance guarantees in packet-switching networks. We describe their nechanisms, their similarities and dirrerences, and the performance guarantees they can provide. Various issues and tradeoffs in designing service disciplines of r guaranteed performance service are discussed, and a general framework for studying and comparing these disciplines are presented.