Achieving Bursty Traffic Guarantees by Integrating Traffic Engineering and Buffer Management Tools

Traffic engineering tools are applied to design a set of paths, e.g., using MPLS, in the network in order to achieve global network utilization. Usually, paths are guaranteed long-term traffic rates, while the short-term rates of bursty traffic are not guaranteed. The resource allocation scheme, suggested in this paper, handles bursts based on maximal

traffic volume allocation

(termed

TVAfB

) instead of a single maximal or sustained rate allocation. This translates to better SLAs to the network customers, namely SLAs with higher traffic peaks, that guarantees burst non-dropping. Given a set of paths and bandwidth allocation along them, the suggested algorithm finds a special collection of bottleneck links, which we term the

first cut

, as the optimal buffering location for bursts. In these locations, the buffers act as an additional resource to improve the network short-term behavior, allowing traffic to take advantage of the under-used resources at the links that precede and follow the bottleneck links. The algorithm was implemented in MATLAB. The resulted provisioning parameters were simulated using NS-2 to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.