Rate-function scheduling

Rate-function scheduling (RFS) is a new deadline-based packet-scheduling service discipline that supports quality-of-service guarantees for applications with real-time communication requirements. RFS is distinguished from other service disciplines in that it achieves all of the following goals: analytically-derived performance bounds, performance isolation among sessions, flexible and efficient allocation of bandwidth, implementation simplicity, work-conserving operation, and bandwidth-fair operation (defined in the paper). Through the specification of rate functions, sessions can control their bandwidth usage and their upper bounds on delay. For a class of rate functions, which we show is sufficient for providing sessions with delay bounds, RFS is as simple to implement and to calculate service bounds such as Zhang´s VirtualClock service discipline. We also show that the non-preemptive earliest deadline first policy is a simple degeneration of RFS