Intelligent Traffic Conditioners for Assured Forwarding Based Differentiated Services Networks

Issues related to bandwidth assurance in Assured Forwarding based Differentiated Services (Diffserv) networks have been discussed in recent research papers [7][8][11]. Some of the factors that can bias bandwidth assurance are Round Trip Time (RTT), UDP/TCP interaction and different target rates. The bias due to these factors needs to be mitigated before bandwidth assurance for a paying customer can be articulated in Service Level Agreements (SLAs). This paper proposes intelligent traffic conditioning approaches at the edge of the network to mitigate the effect of Round Trip Time, UDP/TCP interactions, and different target rates. The simulation results show a significant improvement in bandwidth assurance with intelligent traffic conditioning. The limitation of the proposed solutions is that they require communication between edge devices. In addition, these solutions are not applicable for a one-to-any network topology.