The Stratified Round Robin scheduler: design, analysis and implementation

Stratified Round Robin is a fair-queueing packet scheduler which has good fairness and delay properties, and low quasi-O(1) complexity. It is unique among all other schedulers of comparable complexity in that it provides a single packet delay bound that is independent of the number of flows. Importantly, it is also amenable to a simple hardware implementation, and thus fills a current gap between scheduling algorithms that have provably good performance and those that are feasible and practical to implement in high-speed routers. We present both analytical results and simulations to demonstrate its performance properties.