A survey of adaptive bandwidth control algorithms

In packet-switched network traffic management and control, efficiently allocating bandwidth to provide quantitative packet-level QoS to aggregate traffic has been difficult due to unpredictable, unknown statistical characteristics of the aggregate traffic. With inaccurate traffic information, using static bandwidth allocation results in the network being underutilized, or the QoS requirement not being satisfied. An alternative is to use adaptive bandwidth control (ABC), whereby the allocated bandwidth is regularly adjusted over the packet-level time scale to attain a given QoS requirement. This paper provides a literature review of ABC algorithms that guarantee aggregate traffic packet-level QoS metrics, such as the average queue length, packet loss, and packet delay. We describe different ABC algorithms, identify their advantages and shortcomings, and provide some comparative performance evaluation results. Open issues in ABC for future research directions are also discussed.