AVERAGE WAITING TIME ASSIGNMENT .2. THE INTEGRATED SERVICES NETWORK CASE

Priority scheduling as a means to selectively control the average delay of the users in a virtual circuit integrated services network is investigated. Specifically, quantifying the end-to-end delay preferences of the users on an individual basis through associated delay cost functions, the selection of the scheduling strategies on the links of the network is formulated as a convex optimization problem whose objective consists of minimizing the overall delay cost. We give a set of optimality conditions for this problem, and construct two distributed algorithms for solving it. The first algorithm always converges to an optimal solution, while the second algorithm is approximate. However, the second algorithm requires less coordination than the first, and by appropriately selecting the parameters the solution can be brought as close to optimality as desired. With simple modifications, the algorithms also solve the problem of selecting the scheduling strategies on the links so as to minimize the lexicographic ordering of the cost vector.