Responsive aperiodic services in high-speed networks

A fast packet-switched network is considered that transmits fixed-sized packets or cells and provides connection-oriented services. A number of rate-based service disciplines that offer timing guarantees have recently been proposed. These disciplines work well for connections which exhibit low burstiness or whose burstiness can be managed by admission control. However, some messages have irregular arrival patterns, but must be delivered with low delay. These aperiodic messages include connection set-up/tear-down messages, link-slate updates, and other status or alarm messages. The authors propose techniques that significantly minimize aperiodic message delay without jeopardizing guarantees made to existing connections. Simple hardware implementations of these techniques that can be embedded in output queues of fast packet-switches are also described