Quality-of-Service Measures for Real-time Communications

Quality-of-Service(QoS) is a set of service requirements to be met by the network while transporting a data flow in real-time communication systems. Many real-time sources generate traffic with variable rates. In this paper, we studied a class of soft real-time applications whose bandwidth requirements are random variables. We defined two models for soft real-time communications: the dropping model and the keeping model. We measure the QoS of the whole system, not individual applications. We defined three measures for the system’s performance: system feasibility, packet transferability, and weighted packet transferability. Different scheduling algorithms are studied. Some related issues are also studied, such as queue size and gain functions. Finally we implement a simulator and some typical simulation results and conclusions are presented. KeywordsSoft Real-time System, System Feasibility, Packet Transferability, Weighted Packet Transferability This work was partially supported by AT&T 43577 and NSF MIP 97-04276.