End-to-end QoS guarantees for a network based on latency-rate max-min service curve

Recently, some studies have been made based on the concept of route interference to provide deterministic end-to-end quality of service (QoS) guarantees. Nonetheless, these studies tend to confine to a simple scheduling scheme and study the traffic in a single-class environment or the highest priority traffic in a multi-class environment. This is rather restrictive. In this paper, we propose a new general service scheme to service flows. This scheme is represented by a latency-rate max-min service curve (LRMMSC). Subsequently, for a network of LRMMSC, we prove the existence of tight bounds on end-to-end queuing delay and backlog. Our approach has two salient features: (1) the general nature of the concept of service curve enables the service scheme to be implemented by many well-known scheduling disciplines; (2) the general network model adopted with no constraints on the manner of packet queuing makes the results applicable to many complex networks. In addition, we have also derived a concise expression of end-to-end queuing delay that depends only on the service offered to the buffers containing the considered flow. This is very useful in practice as the expression is simple and requires minimum amount of information input.