Performance evaluation of a gradual differentiation scheme for telecommunication networks

Supporting different services with different Quality of Service (QoS) requirements is not an easy task in modern telecommunication networks. An efficient priority scheduling discipline is thus of great importance. The static, Head-Of-Line (HOL) discipline achieves differentiation between different types of traffic, but may have a too severe impact on the performance of low-priority traffic. In this paper, we propose a priority discipline with priority jumps: packets of the low-priority level can jump to the high-priority level in the course of time. We use probability generating functions to study the system analytically. Some interesting mathematical challenges thereby arise. The impact of priority jumps on the performance of a telecommunication system is finally evaluated by some numerical examples