Preserving conformance for GCRA regulated flows

Traffic policing/shaping has been employed at the edge of networks to ensure proper provisioning of network resources and Quality of Service (QoS) guarantees. As shown in this thesis, however, network flows that have been regulated at the network edge based on traffic descriptors, e.g., GCRA, may still become non-conforming in the network core, depending on the packet scheduling algorithm used. Two supplemental schemes to scheduling algorithms are proposed and analyzed in this thesis to ensure conformance for GCRA regulated flows. The first scheme is to add an additional traffic regulator to shape the traffic more aggressively than required constraints before entering the scheduler. The second scheme explicitly computes the eligible departure time for the next packet of each flow in the scheduler. Performance achievable by both schemes, in terms of the percent non-conforming packets and the average delay, are investigated via simulation, when implemented for the First Come First Serve (FCFS) and the Weighted Fair Queuing (WFQ) schedulers