A new scalable service discipline for real-time traffic: The framed-deadline scheduler

Quality of Service (QoS) support in a scalable and low-complexity fashion is important in high-speed networks carrying real-time traffic. There are service disciplines that can provide end-to-end bandwidth and delay guarantees. However, they are designed to operate with expensive output queuing switches or with combined input–output queuing (CIOQ) switches that require very complicated fabric schedulers. We propose a novel service discipline, the Framed-deadline Scheduler (FDS), for connection oriented networks. FDS can work with a CIOQ packet switch to provide the same end-to-end QoS guarantees as service disciplines that only work with output queuing switches. The fabric scheduler of the CIOQ switch is simple and the implementation of FDS has O(1) complexity. Hence, FDS is a scalable service discipline that can provide end-to-end QoS guarantees for real-time traffic in high-speed networks.