Competitive queue policies for differentiated services

We consider the setting of a network providing differentiated services. As is often the case in differentiated services, we assume the packets are tagged as either being high- or low-priority packets. Outgoing links in the network are serviced by a single FIFO queue. Our model gives a benefit of /spl alpha//spl ges/1 to each high-priority packet and a benefit of 1 to each low-priority packet. A queue policy controls which of the arriving packets are dropped and which enter the queue. Once a packet enters the queue it is eventually sent. The aim of a queue policy is to maximize the sum of the benefits of all the packets it delivers. We analyze and compare different queue policies for this problem using the competitive analysis approach, where the benefit of the online policy is compared to the benefit of an optimal offline policy. We derive both upper and lower bounds for the policies we consider, and in most cases our bounds are tight. We believe that competitive analysis gives important insight into the performance of these simple queuing policies.

[1]  Allan Borodin,et al.  Online computation and competitive analysis , 1998 .

[2]  David Clark,et al.  An Approach to Service Allocation in the Internet , 1997 .

[3]  Boaz Patt-Shamir,et al.  Buffer overflow management in QoS switches , 2001, STOC '01.

[4]  J. Turner,et al.  New directions in communications (or which way to the information age?) , 1986, IEEE Communications Magazine.

[5]  Abhay Parekh,et al.  A generalized processor sharing approach to flow control in integrated services networks: the single-node case , 1993, TNET.

[6]  Yishay Mansour,et al.  Loss-bounded analysis for differentiated services , 2001, ACM-SIAM Symposium on Discrete Algorithms.

[7]  Christophe Diot,et al.  Simple performance models of differentiated services schemes for the Internet , 1999, IEEE INFOCOM '99. Conference on Computer Communications. Proceedings. Eighteenth Annual Joint Conference of the IEEE Computer and Communications Societies. The Future is Now (Cat. No.99CH36320).

[8]  Van Jacobson,et al.  A Two-bit Differentiated Services Architecture for the Internet , 1999, RFC.

[9]  Robert E. Tarjan,et al.  Amortized efficiency of list update and paging rules , 1985, CACM.

[10]  Yishay Mansour,et al.  Competitve buffer management for shared-memory switches , 2001, SPAA '01.