netnice: nice is not only for CPUs-a simple subnetwork bandwidth management scheme

In this paper, we present "netnice", a mechanism that allows processes to throttle their own network bandwidth consumption. As the name suggests, it is inspired by the Unix "nice" command in that it allows users and administrators to limit the network resources used by individual processes in order to avoid impacting the performance of other processes. In the paper, to address the problem of transient performance deterioration in local area network (LAN) environments, we propose a bandwidth limitation primitive that works within a host's kernel, called netnice. We also show several uses of netnice. Through experimentation in a small LAN of FreeBSD machines, we show how netnice allows for higher degree of controllability in bandwidth management.