Delay guarantee of virtual clock server

Abstract

In a packet switching network, each communication channel is statistically shared among many traffic flows that belong to different end-to-end sessions. We present and prove a delay guarantee for the virtual clock service discipline (inspired by time division multiplexing). The guarantee has several desirable properties, including the following firewall property: the guarantee to a flow is unaffected by the behavior of other flows sharing the same server. There is no assumption that sources are flow controlled or well behaved. We first introduce and define the concept of an active flow. The delay guarantee is then formally stated as a theorem. We show how to obtain delay bounds from the delay guarantee of a single server for different specifications.