Delay Jitter Bounds and Packet Scale Rate Guarantee for Expedited Forwarding

We consider the definition of the Expedited Forwarding Per-Hop Behaviour (EF PHB) as given in RFC 2598, and its impact on worst case end-to-end delay jitter. On one hand, the definition in RFC 2598 can be used to predict extremely low end-to-end delay jitter, independent of the network scale. On the other hand, we find that the worst case delay jitter can be made arbitrarily large, while each flow traverses at most a specified number of hops, if we allow networks to become arbitrarily large, this is in contradiction with the previous statement. We analyze where the contradiction originates, and find the explanation. It resides in the fact that the definition in RFC 2598 is not easily implementable in schedulers we know of, mainly because it is not formal enough, and also because it does not contain an error term. We propose a new definition for the EF PHB, called ``Packet Scale Rate Guarantee