Design of a Stochastic Traffic Regulator for End-to-End Network Delay Guarantees

Providing end-to-end network delay guarantees in packet-switched networks such as the Internet is highly desirable for mission-critical and delay-sensitive data transmission, yet it remains a challenging open problem. Since deterministic bounds are based on the worst-case traffic behavior, various frameworks for stochastic network calculus have been proposed to provide less conservative, probabilistic bounds on network delay, at least in theory. However, little attention has been devoted to the problem of regulating traffic according to stochastic burstiness bounds, which is necessary in order to guarantee the delay bounds in practice. We design and analyze a stochastic traffic regulator that can be used in conjunction with results from stochastic network calculus to provide probabilistic guarantees on end-to-end network delay. Two alternative implementations of the stochastic regulator are developed and compared. Numerical results are provided to demonstrate the performance of the proposed stochastic traffic regulator.