Achieving bursty traffic guarantees by integrating traffic engineering and buffer management tools

Traffic engineering tools are applied to design a set of paths, e.g., using MPLS, in the network in order to achieve global network utilization. Usually, paths are guaranteed long-term traffic rates, while the short-term rates of bursty traffic are not guaranteed. The resource allocation scheme, suggested in this paper, handles bursts based on maximal traffic volume allocation (termed TVAfB) instead of a single maximal or sustained rate allocation. This translates to better SLAs to the network customers, namely SLAs with higher traffic peaks, that guarantees burst non-dropping. Given a set of paths and bandwidth allocation along them, the suggested algorithm finds a special collection of bottleneck links, which we term the first cut, as the optimal buffering location for bursts. In these locations, the buffers act as an additional resource to improve the network short-term behavior, allowing traffic to take advantage of the under-used resources at the links that precede and follow the bottleneck links. The algorithm was implemented in MATLAB. The resulted provisioning parameters were simulated using NS-2 to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.