Edge-to-edge proactive congestion control for aggregated traffic

We present Ping Trunking, a novel edge-to-edge management technique that can provide soft service guarantees to aggregate traffic streams without requiring any special support at the core of the network. Our proposal is designed to work over aggregated flows that bundle a varying number of user flows for common treatment between two nodes in a network. To regulate the user data transmission rate, a Vegas-like management connection is established between the two edges of each aggregate. This control connection injects control packets into the network to probe its congestion level. Thanks to this managing, Ping Trunking is able to fairly share the network bandwidth among competing aggregates in accordance with their subscribed target rates. In addition, it does not cause undesired sharp variations in the transmission rates of handled aggregates and avoids packet losses at the core nodes. We demonstrate analytically and through simulation experiments the effectiveness of our technique. (c) 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.