A cell burst scheduling for ATM networking. I. Theory

Fair queueing is a useful queueing discipline for packet switching systems. It was developed in last decade and was aimed at the general packet switching systems with varying packet length. However it is not suitable for use in the ATM networking, because the ATM cell length is very small and fixed, and so the scheduling scheme on a per cell basis is not practical. We introduce the burst and quality unit concepts in the scheduling algorithm and we make some significant modification on the fair queueing and adapt it to ATM networking to meet QoS requirements. Under the work-conserving assumption, we show that the burst based non-preemptive and preemptive algorithms provide throughput and fairness guarantees.