SRPT applied to bandwidth-sharing networks

We consider bandwidth-sharing networks, and show how the SRPT (Shortest Remaining Processing Time) discipline can be used in order to improve the delay performance of the system. Our main idea is not to use SRPT globally between the traffic classes, which has been shown to induce instability, but rather deploy SRPT only locally within each traffic class. We show that with this approach, the performance of any stable bandwidth allocation policy can be improved. Importantly, our result is valid for any network topology and any flow size distribution. A numerical study is included to illustrate the results.