Switched Multi-hop Priority Queued Networks-Influence of priority levels on Soft Real-time Performance

In the last few years, the number of real-time applications has increased. These applications are sensitive and require the methods to utilize existing network capacity efficiently to meet performance requirements and achieve the maximum throughput to overcome delay, jitter and packet loss. In such cases, when the network needs to support highly interactive traffic like packet-switched voice, the network congestion is an issue that can lead to various problems. If the level of congestion is high enough, the users may not be able to complete their calls and have existing calls dropped or may experience a variety of delays that make it difficult to participate smooth conversation. In this paper, we investigate the effect of priority levels on soft real-time performance. We use the priority queues to help us manage the congestion, handle the interactive traffic and improve the over all performance of the system. We consider switched multi-hop network with priority queues. All the switches and end-nodes control the real-time traffic with “Earlier Deadline First” scheduling. The performance of the network is characterized in terms of the average delay, the deadline missing ratio and the throughput. We will analyze these parameters with both the bursty traffic and evenly distributed traffic. We will analyze different priority levels and will see how the increase in priority level increases the performance of the soft real-time system.