Graceful degradation of loss-tolerant QoS using (m, k)-firm constraints in guaranteed rate networks

The Weighted Fair Queueing (WFQ) scheduling algorithm and its variants can be used to provide real-time guarantees by making bandwidth reservation. However, while hard guarantees are based on a peak workload model that leads to underutilize network resources, soft guarantees, based on average workload model, are not always sufficient to maintain acceptable Quality-of-Service (QoS) since consecutive packet losses or deadline misses may occur, which are not suitable for real-time applications. In this paper, we propose a trade-off between hard and soft real-time guarantees to maintain an acceptable QoS in overload conditions and efficiently maximize the utilization of network resources. The key to our solution is based on the fact that many real-time applications, such as voice and video, are loss-tolerant. The loss profile must be well defined, and such a profile can be easily specified using the (m,k)-firm model. Therefore, we propose the (m,k)-WFQ algorithm to take into account (m,k)-firm timing constraints to provide delay guarantees of at least m packets out of any k consecutive packets without violating bandwidth fairness or misusing network resources. Using the Network Calculus theory, an analytic study gives the deterministic delay bound provided by the (m,k)-WFQ algorithm for upper bounded arrival curve traffic. We extend our analytic results for guaranteed-rate networks, such as the IntServ QoS model and ATM networks, and the DiffServ QoS model. Analytic results and simulations show a noticeable improvement in delay guarantee made by (m,k)-WFQ compared to WFQ without much degradation of bandwidth fairness.