An integrated scheduling and buffer management scheme for packet-switched routers

The future growth of the Internet requires the design and development of high-speed routers that forward an exponentially increasing volume of traffic and provide QoS guarantees at the same time. The resources that routers need to manage in order to support service differentiation mainly include bandwidth and buffers. The corresponding mechanisms consist of buffer management and scheduling schemes, respectively. In this paper, an end-to-end hierarchical scheduling and buffer management scheme is presented. This scheme allows resource sharing among traffic streams that are grouped according to administrative affiliation, protocol, traffic type or other criteria. This scheme is integrated to provide both fair resource-sharing among flows and strict priority for real-time service.