Congestion-free transmission of real-time traffic in packet networks

The process of packet clustering in a network with well-regulated input traffic is studied. Based on this study, a strategy for congestion-free communication in packet networks is proposed. The strategy provides guaranteed services per connection with no packet loss and an end-to-end delay which is a constant plus a small bounded jitter term. Therefore, it provides an attractive solution for the transmission of real-time traffic in packet networks. The strategy is composed of an admission policy imposed per connection at the source node and a particular queuing scheme, called stop-and-go queuing, practiced at the switching nodes. The admission policy requires the packet stream of each connection to possess a certain smoothness property upon arrival to the network, while the queuing scheme eliminates the process of packet clustering and thereby preserves the smoothness property as packets travel inside the network. Implementation of the stop-and-go queuing is simple, with little processing overhead and minor hardware modifications to the conventional FIFO (first in, first out) queuing structure.>