A new deterministic traffic model for core-stateless scheduling

Core-stateless scheduling algorithms have been proposed in the literature to overcome the scalability problem of the stateful approach. Instead of maintaining per-flow information or performing per-packet flow classification at core routers, packets are scheduled according to the information (time stamps) carried in their headers. They can hence provision quality of service (QoS) and achieve high scalability. In this paper, which came from our observation that it is more convenient to evaluate a packet's delay in a core-stateless network with reference to its time stamp than to the real time, we propose a new traffic model and derive its properties. Based on this model, a novel time-stamp encoding scheme, which is theoretically proven to be able to minimize the end-to-end worst case delay in a core-stateless network, is presented. With our proposed traffic model, performance analysis in core-stateless networks becomes straightforward.