LAWIN: A Latency-AWare InterNet architecture for latency support on best-effort networks

While strict latency restrictions are imposed on network applications, current best-effort Internet architecture entirely lacks this support. In this paper, we propose a “Latency AWare InterNet” (LAWIN) architecture that supports various latency requirements while retaining the best-effort service model. In the LAWIN architecture, applications specify their desired network latency limits, or deadlines, into all packets, and routers schedule these packets according to their deadlines. To this end, we propose two earliest-deadline-first (EDF)-based packet schedulers. The first imposes the same packet loss rate on all applications regardless of the latency specified by each, and provides rough flow-rate fairness. The second scheduler imposes a biased packet loss probability. The biased scheduler also provides an efficient latency and bandwidth trading mechanism for application settings, which motivates applications to set optimal latencies in order to improve efficiency.