On the Benefits of Traffic "Reprofiling'' -- The Single Hop Case

TL;DR

This paper investigates how traffic reprofiling in single-hop networks can ensure deterministic delay guarantees while minimizing bandwidth, showing that simple schedulers can perform nearly as well as complex ones through profile modifications.

Contribution

It provides optimal solutions for local deadline guarantees in single-hop configurations, highlighting how traffic reprofiling reduces bandwidth needs with simpler schedulers.

Findings

Reprofiling enables simple schedulers to meet delay guarantees efficiently.

Optimal solutions for local deadlines improve bandwidth utilization.

Simple schedulers can perform close to complex ones with proper traffic profile adjustments.

Abstract

The need to guarantee hard delay bounds to traffic flows with deterministic traffic profiles, e.g., token buckets, arises in a number of network settings. Of interest are solutions that offer such guarantees while minimizing network bandwidth. The paper explores a basic building block towards realizing such solutions, namely, a single hop configuration. The main results are in the form of optimal solutions for meeting local deadlines under schedulers of varying complexity and therefore cost. The results demonstrate how judiciously modifying flows' traffic profiles, i.e., reprofiling them, can help simple schedulers reduce the bandwidth they require, often performing nearly as well as more complex ones.