Decoupling the Bandwidth and Latency Bounding for Table-based Schedulers

The provision of quality of service (QoS) in computing and communication environments is currently the focus of much discussion and research in industry and academia. A key component for networks with QoS support is the output scheduling algorithm. Some of the latest network technology proposals define scheduling algorithms that use an arbitration table to select the next packet to be transmitted. These table-based schedulers are simple to implement and can offer good latency performance. However, the versions proposed until now do not work properly with variable packet sizes. Moreover, they face the problem of bounding the bandwidth and latency assignments. In this paper, we propose a new table-based scheduler, which we call deficit table (DTable), that works properly with variable packet sizes. We also propose a methodology to decouple the bandwidth and latency assignments