Dynamic Capacity Resizing for Fair Bandwidth Sharing in Virtual Private Networks

摘要

A virtual private network (VPN) service is likely to be used by customers as a replacement for networks constructed using private lines, and thus its functionality should include the performance guarantee provided to those customers. To provide guaranteed services, the network provider allocates appropriate capacities to multiple virtual backbone networks such that the underlying network can be shared among them. As VPN users are demanding reliable and dynamic allocation of capacities, recently the capacity resizing approach has been considered as a cost efficient way of providing virtual network services. We propose a new scheme for dynamic allocation of virtual link capacities. The allocated capacities are adjusted dynamically according to the users' requests such that their capacities are increased in a fair manner and the total reservation does not overwhelm the underlying network. Depending on the network's status and allocation policy, a virtual link may increase or decrease its capacity, for example, for a monetary incentive. VPN users send control packets whenever they want to resize their capacities, and the network handles them in an efficient and fail-way. The simulation and analytic results in this paper show that our scheme is simple and robust such that the users and the network communicate using simple control packets and the link capacities are allocated efficiently.