Novel Architectures and Algorithms for Delay Reduction in Back-pressure Scheduling and Routing

TL;DR

This paper proposes new architectures and algorithms to significantly reduce delay in back-pressure scheduling and routing, addressing queue management complexity and long route issues to improve network performance.

Contribution

It introduces novel solutions that enhance delay performance and reduce complexity in back-pressure algorithms, a key step forward in network scheduling.

Findings

Reduced delay in back-pressure scheduling and routing.

Simplified queue management at network nodes.

Improved routing efficiency with shorter paths.

Abstract

The back-pressure algorithm is a well-known throughput-optimal algorithm. However, its delay performance may be quite poor even when the traffic load is not close to network capacity due to the following two reasons. First, each node has to maintain a separate queue for each commodity in the network, and only one queue is served at a time. Second, the back-pressure routing algorithm may route some packets along very long routes. In this paper, we present solutions to address both of the above issues, and hence, improve the delay performance of the back-pressure algorithm. One of the suggested solutions also decreases the complexity of the queueing data structures to be maintained at each node.