Providing End-to-End Delay Requirements in Heterogeneous Networks using Zone Delay Assignment

Providing end-to-end delay has been an important issue in Quality of Service enabled networks. If we can assign a call’s end-to-end delay requirement optimally to each node along the route of that call, the whole network can be better utilized. In practice, routers in a network are likely to use different packet scheduling policies. Due to the differences in the scheduling policies, delay bounds one router can provide may be different from another, even if they have the same load. Therefore, using traditional per-node delay assignment methods may result in lower capacity. In this paper, we propose a hierarchical delay distribution method, called Zone Delay Assignment, to distribute the delay requirement first to the “homogeneous zones” that use different scheduling policies, then assign the distributed delay to each node within each zone. We verify using simulation that by applying Zone Delay Assignment, we can achieve better network capacity.