Assuring Fair Allocation of Excess Bandwidth in Reservation Based Core-Stateless Networks

Assuring guaranteed services and providing fair bandwidth sharing are much sought characteristics in the current network architecture research. The IntServ approaches achieve those characteristics but only at the expense of using per-flow states and signaling, which are not scalable and difficult to implement. Alternatively, the stateless approaches proposed up to now are focused either on providing guaranteed services similar to those offered by IntServ or on ensuring a reasonably fair bandwidth allocation. In this paper we propose a stateless architecture – the Fair Bandwidth Allocation Control (Fair-BAC) – that ensures both the adherence to the given throughput guarantees and a fair allocation of the remaining bandwidth between the flows that do not have any reservation and the out-of-profile fraction of the flows with reservation. The capabilities of Fair-BAC are demonstrated in a set of simulations performed for various degrees of congestion and using sources with different conformance levels.