Boosting the network performance via traffic reshaping

Traffic reshaping and its impact on providing deterministic guarantees of timely data delivery in a packet-switched virtual-circuit fixed-packet network are investigated. Two types of traffic smoothing are considered: global reshaping (when traffic on all network connections is smoothed) and local reshaping (when the traffic specification is changed only for a single connection). The conditions when reshaping is beneficial are derived and the optimal values of traffic model parameters are obtained. In particular, it is shown that, when one tries to minimize end-to-end delay bounds for leaky bucket constrained traffic, the traffic either should be made constant bit rate (CBR) or should not be reshaped at all. It is proven that changing the leaky bucket specification to the dual leaky bucket specification is always able to yield better timeliness guarantees and utilisation of network resources. Finally, local reshaping for the dual leaky bucket model is studied.