Schemes for scheduling of control messages by hierarchical protocols

The paper addresses the problem of designing efficient scheduling policies for the transmission of control messages by hierarchical network protocols. Such protocols encounter a tradeoff between the desire to forward a control message across the tree as soon, as it is received, and the desire to reduce control traffic. Scheduling problems that arise in this context are defined and discussed. The paper mainly concentrates on minimizing the average extra delay encountered by the control messages under an upper bound on the number of outgoing messages a node can send during a fixed period of time. A polynomial-time algorithm is presented for the off-line version of the problem, and then several efficient on-line heuristics are presented and compared