Enhanced bulk scheduling for supporting delay sensitive streaming applications

Providing end-to-end delay guarantees for delay sensitive applications is an important packet scheduling issue with routers. In this paper, to support end-to-end delay requirements, we propose a novel network scheduling scheme, called the bulk scheduling scheme (BSS), which is built on top of existing schedulers of intermediate nodes without modifying transmission protocols on either the sender or receiver sides. By inserting special control packets, which called TED (Traffic Specification with End-to-end Deadline) packets, into packet flows at the ingress router periodically, the BSS schedulers of the intermediate nodes can dynamically allocate the necessary bandwidth to each flow to enforce the end-to-end delay, according to the information in the TED packets. The introduction of TED packets incurs less overhead than the per-packet marking approaches. Three flow bandwidth estimation methods are presented, and their performance properties are analyzed. BSS also provides a dropping policy for discarding late packets and a feedback mechanism for discovering and resolving bottlenecks. The simulation results show that BSS performs efficiently as expected.