Abstract
In this paper, we consider the problem of providing delay guarantees in a distributed environment, e.g., a wireless network or a cable network. In a distributed environment, the information of the arrival process is, in general, not available to the network. Due to the lack of such information, traffic regulators and scheduling policies discussed in the literature cannot be directly applied. To cope with the problem, we propose a distributed traffic regulator (DTR) that uses the information of the departure process. Based on such DTRs, we propose the distributed earliest deadline first (DEDF) scheduling policy. For the DEDF scheme, we derive an admission-control criterion and show that the maximum delay can be guaranteed if the criterion is satisfied.