TCP trunking for bandwidth management of aggregate traffic

TCP trunking is a novel way of applying TCP congestion control to bandwidth management of aggregate traffic. This is accomplished by setting up a separate TCP connection to probe network congestion, and then using the TCP connection’s congestion control to regulate the bandwidth usage of the aggregate traffic. TCP trunking offers several advantages in managing bandwidth of aggregate traffic. It can dynamically allocate bandwidth to competing traffic aggregates in a fair manner, while assuring no loss of user packets due to network congestion. In addition, it can transmit user packets at guaranteed rates for traffic aggregates. Implementation details and experimental results are described in the paper.