Virtual private networks (VPN) and link sharing are cost-effective ways of realizing corporate intranets. Corporate intranets will increasingly have to provide integrated services for voice and multimedia traffic. Although packet scheduling algorithms can be used to implement integrated services in link sharing and virtual private networks, their statistical multiplexing gains are limited. We propose a new scheme called stochastic fair sharing (SFS) to carry out fair link sharing and fair sharing among virtual leased links (VLL). In the link sharing environment, capacities allocated to different classes are adjusted dynamically as sessions arrive (or depart). The SFS admission control algorithm decides which sessions to accept and which to reject depending upon the current utilizations and provisioned capacities of the classes. SFS gives protection to classes with low session arrival rate against classes with high session arrival rates by ensuring them a low blocking probability. In the case of multi-hop VLL, capacity resizing requests are sent in the service providers's network which are admission-controlled using SFS. Our simulations indicate that using SFS, the equivalent capacity of virtual links converge to their max-min fair capacity, with a fairness index of 0.97 in extreme situations. The average signaling load of the protocol was found to be reasonable. The scheme is simple to implement, efficient, and robust. The potential applications of SFS are fair and efficient resource sharing in telecommunication networks, ATM networks, virtual private networks (VPN) and integrated services or differentiated services-based IP networks.
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