Cooperative traffic scheduling

摘要

To reduce and/or guarantee the round-trip delay of interactive processes, cooperative scheduling in forward and backward direction is proposed. In practice, a basic idea is to estimate the delay of packets of different users during network-based scheduling of packets in forward direction. During scheduling of packets in backward direction, packets of those users having larger delay in forward direction are given higher priority based on the estimated delay. In this way the total round-trip delay can be reduced and/or even guaranteed. This means that more users will be satisfied and experience faster connections to services.

主权项

1. A method for reducing round-trip delay for interactive processes in a communication system that operates based on network-based multi-user packet scheduling, said method comprising:
selecting packets associated with interactive processes and not selecting packets associated with non-interactive processes from among a plurality of packets associated with the interactive processes and the non-interactive processes, wherein the selected packets correspond to at least one type of communication for at least one of Push-to-Talk services, ACK/NACK data services, and interactive games; responsive to the selection, estimating delay of the packets associated with the interactive processes of different users during network-based scheduling of user packets in a forward direction; communicating information representative of said estimated delay between a first scheduler for scheduling of user packets in the forward direction and a corresponding second scheduler for scheduling of user packets in a backward direction; and prioritizing, during network-based scheduling of user packets in the backward direction and based on said estimated delay, the packets associated with the interactive processes of those users experiencing a larger delay in the forward direction than a delay experienced by other users in the forward direction, so that the round-trip delay can be reduced, where said information representative of said estimated delay is stored in a shared memory by the first scheduler and accessed from said shared memory by the second scheduler.