Elastic and Reliable Bandwidth Reservation Based on Distributed Traffic Monitoring and Control

Bandwidth reservation can effectively improve the service quality for data transfers because of dedicated network resources. However, it is difficult to achieve a desired tradeoff between resource utilization and reliable bandwidth guarantees for data transfers with time-varying traffic. In this article, we study a novel bandwidth reservation solution based on distributed traffic monitoring and control for applications that require reliable bandwidth guarantees. In the proposed solution, designated bandwidth is allocated for an application in advance according to its maximum traffic peak, and idle reserved bandwidth resources are dynamically shared according to regular traffic. Dynamic resource sharing evidently improves resource utilization and effectively eliminates the potential congestion caused by sudden traffic bursts. To ensure that the congestion that occurs occasionally can dissipate rapidly, our solution monitors and manages traffic by a distributed monitoring and control strategy. Hence, we study a delay-constrained and proxy-assisted traffic monitoring structure construction problem and propose an algorithm to solve it. The proposed algorithm can also be used to build a delay-constrained traffic control structure. In addition to the above algorithm, we propose a dynamic traffic control algorithm that can achieve a desirable tradeoff between resource utilization and congestion avoidance capability.