Flow Aggregation of Rate Controlled Round‐Robin Scheduler

Flow aggregation is a scalable method to provide quality of service (QoS) guarantees to a large number of flows economically. A round‐robin scheduler is an efficient scheduling algorithm. We investigate flow aggregation using a round‐robin scheduler and propose the use of periodic timer interrupts for rate control of the round‐robin scheduler. The proposed flow aggregator is a single‐stage scheduler compared to Cobb's two‐stage flow aggregator consisting of an aggregator and non‐aggregating scheduler. It is possible to implement flow aggregation in the existing routers with only a software upgrade. We also present a simulation study showing the delay behaviors of the proposed algorithm.