Traffic Shaping Schemes for Improving Qos in Data Networks

Abstract

As the typical characteristics of traffic in data networks are bursty which is difficult to handle traffic shaping schemes are used for regulating the average rate and hurstiness of a flow of data that enters into the network. While smoothing the traffic of time sensitive applications at the user premises can reduce the losses due to buffer overflows within the network it may have an adverse effect on the losses due to the deadline violations due to the delay introduced by the smoothing process. In this paper these loss factors are investigated and some simple metrics that capture the potential for buffer overflow and deadline violation losses under a traffic shaping scheme are introduced. Such metrics can be useful for the design of effective traffic shaping schemes that balance the adverse effects of buffer overflow and deadline violation losses.