On the Low-latency Region of Best-effort Links for Delay-Sensitive Streaming Traffic

Abstract: This letter analyzes the Low-latency Region (LLR) of a best-effort link (i.e., no traffic differentiation, and first come first serve scheduling) carrying both delay-sensitive (DS) streaming and non-delay-sensitive (NDS) background traffic. Moreover, inside the LLR, we show it exists a proportional fair arrival rate allocation for both the DS and NDS traffic streams. This optimal operating point results from maximizing a simple throughput-delay trade-off that considers the NDS traffic load, and the mean delay of the DS packets. To show how the presented trade-off could be used to allocate NDS traffic in a realistic scenario, we use Google Stadia traffic traces to generate the DS flow. Results from this use-case confirm that the throughput-delay trade-off also works regardless the distribution of the packet arrival and packet service times.