QRP03-3: Bulk Scheduling for Delay Sensitive Streaming Applications

Newly popular Internet applications such as WebTV and Internet streaming requires network to support end-to-end delay bound. In this paper, we propose a novel network scheduling scheme, called the bulk scheduling scheme (BSS), built on top of existing schedulers of intermediate nodes (routers) without modifying transmission protocols on both sender and receiver. By inserting TED packets into packet flows at the ingress router periodically, the BSS schedulers of the intermediate nodes can dynamically allocate the necessary bandwidth to each flow to enforce the end-to-end delay. The introduction of TED packets incurs a lower overhead than the per-packet marking approaches, while achieves similar performance. Three flow bandwidth estimation methods are presented and a dropping policy is introduced to discard late packets. We also propose a feedback mechanism to discover and resolve the bottlenecks for the BSS. The simulation results show that BSS performs efficiently as expected.