Dynamic bandwidth management in virtual private networks

This paper analyses the problem of bandwidth management for the Internet in the environment of virtual private networks (VPNs). A VPN is a private network constructed within a public network infrastructure. In recent years, especially with the growing interest in electronic commerce, VPNs have experienced a dramatic growth. A large amount of work is being done on the improvement of the performance of VPNs, mainly concerning their security. Much less attention has been given to the resource management issues. Resource management should be simple to implement and optimally designed to maximise the network performance. We analyse partitioning of network resources, primarily bandwidth, in order to isolate the communication of families of users and at the same time maximise the performance. This work is based on the dynamic bandwidth partitioning scheme, which has been described previously(8,9). The main feature of this scheme is that it is user-oriented; the bandwidth is allocated in a way that maximises the users' utility. We extend the analysis of the scheme in this paper, by presenting the motivation for hierarchical dynamic bandwidth partitioning, which addresses dynamic bandwidth allocation in the VPN environment.