A new scheme for traffic estimation and resource allocation for bandwidth brokers

This paper is motivated by the concern of a multi-service network provider who plans to offer quality of service guarantees to users. A bandwidth broker acts as the resource manager for each network provider. Neighboring bandwidth brokers communicate with each other to establish inter-domain resource reservation agreements. Conventional approaches for resource allocation rely on pre-determined traffic characteristics. If allocation follows the traffic demand very tightly, the resource usage is efficient but leads to frequent modifications of the reservations. This would lead to increased inter-bandwidth-broker signaling in order to propagate the changes to all the concerned networks. Contrarily, if large cushions are allowed in the reservations, the modifications are far spaced in time but the resource usage becomes highly inefficient. In this paper, a new scheme for estimating the traffic on an inter-domain link and forecasting its capacity requirement, based on a measurement of the current usage, is proposed. The method allows an efficient resource utilization while keeping the number of reservation modifications to low values. 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.