Apply MDP to Class-Based Packet Buffer Management: Markov Decision Process (MDP), Quality of service, Packet buffer management, Packet scheduling, Packet admission control

With the development of Internet and rapid growths of the network bandwidth, the quality of network transmission has a significant improvement. However, in the pluralistic network applications, the dramatic network bandwidth may be occupied by some of computers or users. It affects the communication QoS of general network users or applications. How to deal with the unfair network bandwidth usage problem becomes a critical issue. The network bandwidth management can be realized by packet buffer management or output packet scheduling. In this book, we formulate the packet admission control of buffer management as the MDP optimization problem. All of the received packets are classified into three types. According to the QoS of packet class and traffic condition, the allowing policy derived by the MDP decides whether accept or discard the received packet for getting an optimal packet buffer management. With computer simulation, we demonstrate that the MDP-based buffer management can confine the buffer occupancy of bad-user class packet, and decrease the discarding rate of real-time and good- user class packet significantly.