Bandwidth-Adaptive Scheduling for Quality of Service Enhancement of Real-Time Multimedia Applications in Network Processor Based Router

Problem statement: An explosive growth of multimedia applications in internet has stressed the performance of routers. Hence managing Quality of Service (QoS) enhancement of real-time multimedia applications over IP is a significant and demanding challenge. Approach: To address this issue, Bandwidth Adaptive Stratified Round Robin (BASRR) packet scheduling algorithm has been proposed in this paper for enhancing quality of service of real-time multimedia applications. Embedded Network Processors (NP) have recently emerged with flexibility and speed to reduce the stress of the router by effectively processing the packets. The main objective of this study was to implement the proposed packet scheduling algorithm in a Network Processor (NP) based router for enhancing quality of service of real-time multimedia applications Results: The effectiveness of the BASRR algorithm has been verified by simulations using Intel’s IXP 2400 network processor. The results show that BASRR achieves about 71.25% reduction in jitter compared to SRR when the traffic has uniform distribution of real-time flows and non real-time flows. The reduction in average queuing delay is about 30% compared to SRR for all the types of traffic. Conclusion: The QoS for multimedia applications has been achieved by the proposed non-preemptive Bandwidth Adaptive Stratified Round Robin (BASRR) scheduling algorithm and outperforms the three well-known scheduling algorithms including DRR, WDRR and SRR. The results showed that BASRR is efficient with per packet complexity of O(1) and provides better fairness and reduced delay.