Delivering hard delay guarantees over packet networks is increasingly important to applications ranging from automotive systems, avionics, industrial control, etc. Traffic control and schedulers play an essential role in enforcing such guarantees. In this paper, we focus on ``simple'' static priority and FIFO schedulers, and explore how reprofiling flows entering the network, i.e., proactively shaping them to a different traffic profile, can deliver delay guarantees with less bandwidth. To that end, we formulate a joint optimization framework and develop efficient algorithms to solve it. Extensive evaluations across both realistic and synthetic topologies demonstrate that, as with more sophisticated schedulers, reprofiling flows is beneficial. They also highlight an intuitive coupling between a scheduler's capability and its ability to leverage more complex reprofiling solutions.

翻译：在分组网络上提供硬延迟保证对于从汽车系统、航空电子、工业控制等应用越来越重要。流量控制和调度器在实现此类保证中扮演着关键角色。本文聚焦于“简单”的静态优先级和先进先出调度器，并探讨对进入网络的流进行再塑形（即主动将其塑形为不同的流量特征）如何能够以更少的带宽提供延迟保证。为此，我们构建了一个联合优化框架，并开发了高效算法来求解该问题。在真实和合成拓扑上的广泛评估表明，与更复杂的调度器类似，对流进行再塑形是有益的。这些结果还突显了调度器能力与其利用更复杂再塑形解决方案的能力之间的直观耦合关系。