Evaluation of Resource Reservation Policies for Deterministic Services in Multi-Service Packet Networks

We address the issue of reserving resources at packet switches along the path of connections requiring a deterministic end-to-end delay bound. The switches are assumed to schedule outgoing packets using either the Packet-by-Packet Generalized Processor Sharing (PGPS) or the Rate-Controlled Earliest-Deadline First (RC-EDF) scheduling disciplines. We propose a set of resource reservation policies that are used to map the end-to-end delay requirement into a local rate or local deadline to be reserved at each switch. We present simulation results to evaluate the performance of these resource allocation policies. For PGPS it is found that in general network topologies when shortest-path first routing is used, that uniform allocation performs better than other policies. In the case of RC-EDF, it is shown that non-uniform delay allocation policies provide resilient and superior performance over uniform allocation of resources. This is especially clear in networks with improper capacity planning or heterogeneous links.