  The need to guarantee hard delay bounds to traffic flows with deterministic
traffic profiles, e.g., token buckets, arises in a number of network settings.
Of interest are solutions that offer such guarantees while minimizing network
bandwidth. The paper explores a basic building block towards realizing such
solutions, namely, a single hop configuration. The main results are in the form
of optimal solutions for meeting local deadlines under schedulers of varying
complexity and therefore cost. The results demonstrate how judiciously
modifying flows' traffic profiles, i.e., reprofiling them, can help simple
schedulers reduce the bandwidth they require, often performing nearly as well
as more complex ones.
