Fair scheduling with deadline guarantees in single-hop networks

We address the problem of simultaneously ensuring long-term fairness and deterministic delay guarantees for real-time traffic over a single-hop network. Specifically, we propose a network control policy that maximises a concave utility function of the average throughput of each flow, while guaranteeing that each packet is delivered within a deterministic deadline. Although this problem has been addressed in the past, prior work makes restrictive assumptions, by allowing only binary packet arrival and service processes at each link. The present paper allows for any bounded burst size distributions for the arrival and service processes.