Estimate and Serve: Scheduling Soft Real-Time Packets for Delay Sensitive Media Applications on the Internet

This paper presents a new scheduling algorithm for real time network delivery of packets over Diffserv networks for delay sensitive applications. We name the networks that support this algorithm as Estimated Service (Estserv) networks. These networks, for real time packets, estimate the probability of the packet meeting its deadline and schedule it according to this estimation. This paper validates, given this estimation mechanism, the better performance of the scheduling algorithm over traditional solutions. We show that using Estserv for delay sensitive applications, we can provide out-of-band scheduling, save bandwidth on packets with expired deadlines and handle bursts without loosing the scalability of Diffserv. We show with the help of an implementation in the Linux kernel's ip-forwarding part, that, given the estimation value, Estserv performs better than Diffserv in terms of deadlines, while still saving bandwidth.