A heuristic flow-decomposition approach for generalized processor sharing under self-similar traffic

The well-known Generalized Processor Sharing (GPS) scheduling principle and its variants have received tremendous research efforts due to their appealing properties of fairness, traffic isolation, and work conservation. Traffic self-similarity is highly detrimental to the performance of scheduling mechanisms and communication networks. This paper proposes a novel and heuristic flow-decomposition approach to performance modeling of the GPS system under self-similar traffic. Based on the comprehensive analysis of the excess service sharing behavior of traffic flows, we decompose the GPS system equivalently into a group of single-server single-queue systems. Extensive simulation experiments are used to validate the correctness of the proposed flow-decomposition approach as well as the analytical performance results.