Rotating Combined Queueing (RCQ): Bandwidth and Latency Guarantees in Low-Cost, High-Performance Networks

Network service guarantees not only provide significant performance benefits to distributed computing systems (more balanced resource utilization, fast fault recovery, and fair network access), but they are also essential for many new applications requiring real-time communications with continuous data types (audio/video). Most existing algorithms which provide network service guarantees are too complicated to be feasible in high-speed, low-cost switches for multicomputer networks. The simpler algorithms proposed provide only limited service guarantees or waste significant network resources.We present a novel, cost-effective queueing and scheduling algorithm, called Rotating Combined Queueing (RCQ), which can efficient]y support a range of service guarantees including deterministic delay bounds and bandwidth guarantees in multicomputer networks. By allowing bursty traffic to utilize unused network resources efficiently, RCQ also can provide competitive performance to best-effort data communications. Such cost-effective service guarantees not only provide substantial benefits to the overall system performance, but can also further expand the domain of multicomputer applications to encompass distributed multimedia applications requiring isochronous communications.