MMC02-4: Babylonian Scheduling: A Methodology for Efficient Packet-Flow Scheduling across Network Links

In a WAN, bottleneck links are often primary sources of congestion and resultant QoS degradation in the form of increased queueing delay, jitter, and packet loss. As IMS-based service offerings increase, so too will the need for technologies that jointly optimize QoS for packet flows and utilization of bottleneck links. Optimal scheduling of packet-flow transport across bottleneck links, such as T1 access links and 802.11 WLAN´s, can simultaneously achieve high QoS and high average link utilization; however, optimal online scheduling of heterogeneous packet flows found in multimedia environments is, in general, a hard problem. Babylonian scheduling is a scheduling system design methodology based on mathematical group theory which simplifies the design of efficient scheduling algorithms that meet QoS and utilization objectives and that may be executed online.