Decoupling the bandwidth and latency bounding for table-based schedulers

The provision of Quality of Service (QoS) in computing and communication environments is currently the focus of much discussion and research in industry and academia. A key component for networks with QoS support is the output scheduling algorithm. Some of the latest network technology proposals define scheduling algorithms that use an arbitration table to se-lect the next packet to be transmitted. These table-based schedulers are simple to implement and can offer good la-tency performance. However, the versions proposed until now do not work properly with variable packet sizes. More-over, they face the problem of bounding the bandwidth and latency assignments. In this paper, we propose a new table-based scheduler, which we call Deficit Table (DTable), that works properly with variable packet sizes. We also propose a methodology to decouple the bandwidth and latency assignments. 1