JoBS: Joint Buffer Management and Scheduling for Differentiated Services ? Liebeherr and Nicolas Christin Computer Science Department, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA 22904, USA g f jorg, nicolas ***@ Abstract. A novel algorithm for buffer management and packet scheduling is presented for providing loss and delay differentiation for traffic classes at - work router. The algorithm, called JoBS (Joint Buffer Management and Schedul- ing), provides delay and loss differentiation independently at each node, without assuming admission control or policing. The novel capabilities of the proposed algorithm are that (1) scheduling and buffer management decisions are performed in a single step, and (2) both relative and (whenever possible) absolute QoS re- quirements of classes are supported. Numerical simulation examples, including results for a heuristic approximation, are presented to illustrate the effectiveness of the approach and pare the new algorithm to existing methods for loss and delay differentiation. 1 Introduction Quality-of-Service (QoS) guarantees in works are often classified according to two criteria. The first criterion is whether guarantees are expressed for individual end-to-end traffic flows (per-flow QoS) or for groups of flows with the same QoS re- quirements (per-class QoS). The second criterion is whether guarantees are expressed with reference to guarantees given to other flows/flow classes (relative QoS), or whether guarantees are expressed as absolute bounds (absolute QoS). Efforts to provision for QoS in the in the early and mid-1990s, which re- sulted in the Integrated Services (IntServ) service model [3], focused on per-flow ab- solute QoS guarantees. However, due to scalability issues and a lagging demand for per-flow absolute QoS, the interest in QoS eventually shifted to relative per- class guarantees. Since late 1997, the Differentiated Services (DiffServ) [2] working group has di