Proceedings of the ACM Communications Architectures and Protocols Conference
(SIGCOMM), Karlsruhe, Germany, pp. 239-249, Aug. 2003.

Stratified Round Robin: A Low Complexity Packet Scheduler with Bandwidth
Fairness and Bounded Delay

Sriram Ramabhadran and Joseph Pasquale
Department of Computer Science and Engineering
University of California, San Diego

Fair queuing is a well-studied problem in modern computer networks. However,
there remains a gap between scheduling algorithms that have provably good
performance, and those that are feasible and practical to implement in
high-speed routers. In this paper, we propose a novel packet scheduler
called Stratified Round Robin, which has low complexity, and is amenable to
a simple hardware implementation. Stratified Robin Robin exhibits good
fairness and delay properties that are demonstrated through both analytical
results and simulations. In particular, it provides a single packet delay
bound that is independent of the number of flows. This property is unique to
Stratified Round Robin among all other schedulers of comparable complexity.

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