Proposal for Adaptive Bandwidth Allocation Using One-Way Feedback Control for MPLS Networks

In this research, we focused on fair bandwidth allocation on the Internet. The Internet provides communication services based on exchanged packets. The bandwidth available for each customer is often fluctuated. Fair bandwidth allocation is an important issue for ISPs to gain customer satisfaction. Static bandwidth allocation allows an exclusive bandwidth for specific traffic. Although it gives communications a QoS guarantee, it requires muany bandwidth resources as known as overprovisioning. In contrast with static control, dynamic control allocates bandwidth resources dynamically. It therefore utilizes bandwidth use more effectively. However, it needs control overhead in monitoring traffic and estimating the optimum allocation. The Transmission Control Protocol, or TCP is the dominant protocol on the Internet. It is also equipped with a traffic-rate-control mechanism. An adaptive bandwidth-allocation mechanism must control traffic that is under TCP control. Rapid feedback makes it possible to gain an advantage over TCP control. In this paper, we propose an Adaptive Bandwidth Allocation (ABA) mechanism as a feedback system for MPLS. Our proposal allows traffic to be regulated adaptively as its own weight value which can be assigned by administrators. The feedback bandwidth allocation in the previous work needs round-trip control delay in collecting network status along the communication path. We call this “round-trip feedback control.” Our proposal, called “one-way feedback control,” collects network status in half the time of roundtrip delay. We compare the performance of our one-way feedback-based mechanism and traditional round-trip feedback control under a simulation environment. We demonstrate the advantages of our rapid feedback control has using experimental results. key words: long-distance networks, adaptive bandwidth allocation, oneway feedback control, multi-protocol label switching (MPLS)