TACS: A Transparent Application Bandwidth Management System

With the rapid advance of computer and network technology, more and more applications are deployed in the customer-side network. These applications require different quality of service (QoS), but have to share a few bandwidth limited Internet connections. Owing to the IP network's best-effort delivery mechanism, the QoS requirements are hard to be satisfied. There have been plenty of QoS solutions in research and industry areas, however, few of them are easy to understand or to deploy. Therefore, we provide a solution, based on a simple and clear model, has the ability of transparently deployed at the inner side of customer's gateway device and controlled in the application-oriented way. We also introduce a straightforward QoS policy definition language to allow user to create QoS rules for various applications. We conduct the evaluation of our prototype system running upon mid-end industrial personal computer under both the lab test-bed and the practical network. In the lab test, our system achieves 200Mbps throughput, in the practical field test, our system successfully manages a 100Mbps Internet link for over 3000 active users.