An approach to pricing and resource sharing for Available Bit Rate (ABR) services (1997) [7 citations — 1 self]
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Abstract:
Traditional ABR flow control mechanisms share, in a fair way, the available bandwidth according to the instantaneous peak rate requirements of active traffic streams. Such an approach does not allow bursty users, who besides the peak rate value additional measures of burstiness (e.g., the mean rate), to express their true preferences for network usage. Furthermore, fair sharing is achieved at the short time scales of the duration of the bursts, and cannot express fairness properties defined over longer time scales, such as average throughput. We describe an approach where resource sharing is done according to effective usage. Users bid for some amount of effective bandwidth, and the network controls the effective bandwidth of their traffic by adjusting the explicit rate ER (maximum rate the user is allowed to send traffic) in order to achieve economically fair resource sharing. The feedback loop operates in much longer time scales than the round trip delays, and its performance relies on the heavy multiplexing anticipated due to the large capacity of the broadband links. Experiments demonstrate how our approach can differentiate connections with different mean rates, and show that for anticipated link capacities and traffic burstiness, the approach yields adequate bandwidth utilization. 1
