Abstract

A novel method and its system design for controlling user’s traffic in broadband access segments to enhance fairness among users are proposed and demonstrated. Recently, various new applications such as consumer generated media (e.g. YouTube) and peer-to-peer file sharing have been emerging in addition to the conventional applications such as E-mail and World Wide Web. Such novel applications have behaviors different from those of conventional applications in terms of traffic burstiness, and they tend to exhaust bandwidth for a certain period of time. Hence, there is a potential risk that the traffic of small numbers of specific users assumes bad influence on the traffic quality as well as on the experiences of other users. Such situation must be avoided from the standpoint of service fairness among the users. The proposed bandwidth control system utilizes QoS-related functions of existing heterogeneous access equipments, and provides a mechanism for maintaining bandwidth assignment based on each user’s profile and history of usage. Control of the user traffic according to a bandwidth assignment policy is successfully demonstrated using a prototype system implemented in a testbed.

© 2010 Optical Society of America