Traffic scheduling solutions with QoS support for an input-buffered multimedia router

Quality of service (QoS) support in local and cluster area environments has become an issue of great interest in recent years. Most current high-performance interconnection solutions for these environments have been designed to enhance conventional best-effort traffic performance, but are not well-suited to the special requirements of the new multimedia applications. The multimedia router (MMR) aims at offering hardware-based QoS support within a compact interconnection component. One of the key elements in the MMR architecture is the algorithms used in traffic scheduling. These algorithms are responsible for the order in which information is forwarded through the internal switch. Thus, they are closely related to the QoS-provisioning mechanisms. In this paper, several traffic scheduling algorithms developed for the MMR architecture are described. Their general organization is motivated by chances for parallelization and pipelining, while providing the necessary support both to multimedia flows and to best-effort traffic. Performance evaluation results show that the QoS requirements of different connections are met, in spite of the presence of best-effort traffic, while achieving high link utilizations.