Counters-based modified traffic conditioner

Abstract

Traffic conditioners play a key role in implementing the Assured Service in the framework of the DiffServ approach. Many research papers have focused on finding the best traffic conditioner able to assure contracted target rates and to fairly distribute the excess bandwidth among competing sources. Nevertheless, none of the proposals presented so far accomplishes simultaneously both features. We propose a traffic conditioner for the Internet Assured Service called Counters-Based Modified (CBM) that strictly guarantees target rates and performs a fair share of the excess bandwidth among TCP Reno sources. The ability of strictly providing the inbound bandwidth is inherited from its predecessor the Counters-Based algorithm, and the fairness in the outbound bandwidth distribution is met by probabilistically dropping OUT packets in the traffic conditioner. To determine the dropping probability of an OUT packet, the amount of excess bandwidth and the average RTT of all connections in the traffic conditioner have to be known. Although this fact implies using some sort of signaling, it results more feasible than other proposed intelligent traffic conditioners. The CBM traffic conditioner is evaluated under different conditions by simulation using TCP Reno sources. Simulation results presented in this paper lead us to suggest it as a feasible election for the traffic conditioner device implementation in DiffServ.