Controlling delay differentiation with priority jumps: analytical study

Supporting different services with different Quality of Service (QoS) requirements is not an easy task in modern telecommunication systems: an efficient priority scheduling discipline is of great importance. Fixed or static priority achieves maximal delay differentiation between different types of traffic, but may have a too severe impact on the performance of lower-priority traffic. In this paper, we propose a priority scheduling discipline with priority jumps to control the delay differentiation. In this scheduling discipline, packets can be promoted to a higher priority level in the course of time. We use probability generating functions to study the queueing system analytically. Some interesting mathematical challenges thereby arise. With some numerical examples, we finally show the impact of the priority jumps and of the system parameters.