On the Benefits of Traffic "Reprofiling" -- The Multiple Hops Case -- Part II
For network engineers designing systems with hard delay guarantees, this work provides a practical method to achieve lower bandwidth using simple schedulers, though the benefit is incremental over existing reprofiling approaches.
This paper shows that reprofiling traffic flows (proactively reshaping them) can reduce bandwidth requirements while still delivering hard delay guarantees using simple static priority and FIFO schedulers. Extensive evaluations demonstrate benefits across realistic and synthetic topologies.
Delivering hard delay guarantees over packet networks is increasingly important to applications ranging from automotive systems, avionics, industrial control, etc. Traffic control and schedulers play an essential role in enforcing such guarantees. In this paper, we focus on ``simple'' static priority and FIFO schedulers, and explore how reprofiling flows entering the network, i.e., proactively shaping them to a different traffic profile, can deliver delay guarantees with less bandwidth. To that end, we formulate a joint optimization framework and develop efficient algorithms to solve it. Extensive evaluations across both realistic and synthetic topologies demonstrate that, as with more sophisticated schedulers, reprofiling flows is beneficial. They also highlight an intuitive coupling between a scheduler's capability and its ability to leverage more complex reprofiling solutions.