Non-Preemptive Buffer Management for Latency Sensitive Packets

—The delivery of latency sensitive packets is a crucial issue in real time applications of communication networks. Such packets often have a firm deadline and a packet becomes useless if it arrives after its deadline. The deadline, however, applies only to the packet’s journey through the entire network; individual routers along the packet’s route face a more flexible deadline. We consider policies for admitting latency sensitive packets at a router. Each packet is tagged with a value and a packet waiting at a router loses value over time as its probability of arriving at its destination decreases. The router is modeled as a nonpreemptive queue, and its objective is to maximize the total value of the forwarded packets. When a router receives a packet, it must either accept it (and possibly delay future packets), or reject it immediately. The best policy depends on the set of values that a packet can take. We consider three natural settings: unrestricted model, real-valued model...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2010
• Where: INFOCOM
• Authors: Moran Feldman, Joseph Naor
• Keywords: Communications, INFOCOM 2010, Latency Sensitive Packets, Model, Router