Dynamic inter-SLA resource sharing in path-oriented differentiated services networks

This paper proposes novel resource sharing schemes for differentiated services (DiffServ) networks, to achieve both high resource utilization and quality of service (QoS) guarantee. Service level agreements (SLAs) are negotiated at network boundaries and supported by path-oriented resource mapping within the network. The recently proposed SLA management scheme based on virtual partitioning (Bouillet et al., 2002) allows overloaded SLAs to exploit the spare capacity of underloaded SLAs for efficient resource utilization, however, at the the cost of possible SLA violation of the underloaders. In the bandwidth borrowing scheme proposed here, the dedicated bandwidth for underloaded SLAs is determined and adaptively adjusted at network boundaries according to the actual traffic load and QoS policies; the available spare capacity is then properly distributed to related links for lending to others. On the other hand, the traffic flows admitted with borrowed bandwidth are tagged and may be preempted later when the original bandwidth owner needs to claim back the resources. Through a detailed implementation design and extensive computer simulation results we show that, by bandwidth borrowing, both SLA compliance and high resource utilization can be achieved in various load conditions, with some side benefits such as call-level service differentiation, small admission overhead, and convenience for policy-based management. In addition, we propose a distributed bandwidth pushing scheme that can dynamically adjust the spare bandwidth distribution over the network. Combining bandwidth pushing with bandwidth borrowing, the resource utilization can be further improved.