Scalable Scheduling Support for Loss and Delay Constrained Media Streams

Abstract

Real-time media servers need to service hundreds and, possibly, thousands of clients, each with their own quality of service (QoS) requirements. To guarantee such diverse QoS requires fast and efficient scheduling support at the server. This paper describes the practical issues concerned with the implementation of a scalable real-time packet scheduler resident on a server, designed to meet service constraints on information transferred across a network to many clients. Specifically, we describe the implementation issues and performance achieved by Dynamic Window-Constrained Scheduling (DWCS), which is designed to meet the delay and loss constraints on packets from multiple streams with different performance objectives. In fact, DWCS is designed to limit the number of late packets over finite numbers of consecutive packets in loss-tolerant and/or delay-constrained, heterogeneous traffic streams. We show how DWCS can be efficiently implemented to provide service guarantees to hundreds of streams. We compare the costs of different implementations, including an approximation algorithm, which trades service quality for speed of execution.