gLBF: Per-Flow Stateless Packet Forwarding with Guaranteed Latency and Near-Synchronous Jitter

This paper contributes gLBF (guaranteed Latency-Based Forwarding), a new algorithm for leaky bucket defined traffic flows, feasible for low-cost, high-speed forwarding planes in LAN/RAN/WAN networks to support simply computed, per-hop bounded latency for high-precision communication services. gLBF combines benefits of earlier algorithms such as Urgency-Based Scheduling (UBS) and Cyclic Queuing and Forwarding (CQF) while avoiding their downsides. gLBF does not require per-hop, per-flow state such as shapers or (interleaved) regulators, thus avoiding control complexity and limiting hardware cost. It does not require strict network-wide time synchronization and therefore eliminates the opex and capex of deploying IEEE1588. It minimizes end-to-end jitter, thus eliminating the need for playout buffers in endpoints to compensate for network jitter.