Internet traffic control and management architecture

Internet traffic control and management can be used to serve many different purposes. Congestion control in routing and resource reservation is such an example. Admission control for quality of service is another. Despite the different goals that Internet traffic control and management is trying to achieve, there could be one common architecture that serves as the framework. In this paper, we present such a generic architecture. We also study a particular type of traffic control and management: network load balancing, that is, the distribution of user requests among a set of heterogeneous servers that provide the same information and services to the user. The objective of load balancing is to control and manage how user traffic goes to the servers in order to achieve a higher level of server and network resource utilization. We describe the problem and discuss the various issues for solving the problem. The discussion on the load balancing problem serves as an example to show how the presented architectural framework can be applied to solving real problems.