Economics-Driven Short-Term Traffic Management in MPLS-Based Self-adaptive Networks

Today’s networking environment exhibits significant traffic variability and squeezing profit margins. An adaptive and economicsaware traffic management approach, needed to cope with such environment, is proposed that acts on short timescales (from minutes to hours) and employs an economics-based figure of merit to rellocate bandwidth in an MPLS context. Both underload and overload deviations from the optimal bandwidth allocation are sanctioned through the economical evaluation of the consequences of such non-optimality. A description of the traffic management system is provided together with some simulation results to show its operations.