An architecture for lossless service on a packet switched network

Current designs of high-speed networks assume that the all customers are tolerant of some amount of losses. However, it is possible that some applications may require very high reliability and would be willing to pay more for it, if such a service was available. Motivated by this, we propose two methods of designing a hybrid network which can guarantee zero cell loss probability for type 1 traffic while allowing some losses for type 2 traffic. Our first contribution in this paper is to propose a service discipline (which can be implemented easily on a specific switch architecture) which guarantees zero losses for type 1 traffic (the first method). Our second contribution is to propose an algorithm for a scheduling strategy which reduces the amount of buffers required at the output ports of the switches to zero for type 1 traffic (the second method)