Scheduling Packets with Values and Deadlines in Size-Bounded Buffers
Motivated by providing quality-of-service differentiated services in the Internet, we consider buffer management algorithms for network switches. We study a multi-buffer model. A network switch consists of multiple size-bounded buffers such that at any time, the number of packets residing in each individual buffer cannot exceed its capacity. Packets arrive at the network switch over time; they have values, deadlines, and designated buffers. In each time step, at most one pending packet is allowed to be sent and this packet can be from any buffer. The objective is to maximize the total value of the packets sent by their respective deadlines. A 9.82-competitive online algorithm (Azar and Levy in Lect Notes Comput Sci 4059:5-16 2006) and a 4.73-competitive online algorithm (Li in Lect Notes Comput Sci 5564:265-278, 2009) have been provided for this model, but no offline algorithms have yet been described. In this paper, we study the offline setting of the multi-buffer model. Our contributions include a few optimal offline algorithms for some variants of the model. Each variant has its unique and interesting algorithmic feature.
buffer management algorithm multi-buffer model packet scheduling algorithm bounded-buffer model