Evaluation of multi-point to single-point service traffic shaping in an enterprise network

Service providers within an enterprise network are often governed by client service contracts (CSC) that specify, among other constraints, the rate at which a particular service instance may be accessed. The service can be accessed via multiple points (typically middleware appliances) in a proxy tier configuration. The CSC and thus the rate specified have to be collectively respected by all the middleware appliances. The appliances locally shape the service requests to respect the global contract. We investigate the case where the CSC limits the rate to a service to X requests with an enforcement/observation interval of T seconds across all the middleware appliances. In this paper, we extend, implement, and investigate the Credit-based Algorithm for Service Traffic Shaping (CASTS) in a production level enterprise network setting. CASTS is a decentralized algorithm for service traffic shaping in middleware appliances. We show that CASTS respects the CSC and improves the responsiveness of the system to the variations of the input rate and leads to larger service capacity when compared to the traditional static allocation approach.