Delay Management in Core-Stateless Networks

-Many packet scheduling mechanisms have been proposed to provide rate and delay control to flows. The mechanisms providing strict delay bounds require per-flow state and complex packet classification, which hamper their deployment on a large scale. This paper presents a scheduling mechanism for delay control that does not require per-flow state in interior network nodes (a.k.a. corestateless networks). In our mechanism, the packet delay is un-coupled from the momentary congestion status of the node (i.e. the delay no longer depends on the length of the queue at packet arrival but rather on whether there are packets with more stringent delay requirements) and the granularity in delay differentiation becomes irrespective of the number and size of buffers. It is also shown that end-toend per-flow delay control can be achieved through ensuring local delay management.