Design and performance evaluation of active bandwidth brokers

With the arrivals of critical data transactions and multimedia applications, the needs of network services with different Quality of Service (QoS) guarantees increase rapidly. In order to ensure the delivery of information with a desired quality at the application layer, policy-based management (PBM) systems should be deployed at network service providers for configuring network devices properly. A policy-based management system is capable of resolving and enforcing policy rules in realizing end-to-end QoS for all kinds of network connections. In this paper, a novel design of policy-based management system based on active networks is proposed. Active network technology empowers network routers the ability to execute and move data and program code as needed. It is used in the proposed design (Active Bandwidth Broker architecture) to achieve the goals of system scalability and reliability. Moreover, policy control operations can be distributed among different active nodes. Thus, the architecture reduces the aggregate amount of policy control traffic in networks and expedites the response times on policy requests. Furthermore, the Policy Decision Point is a mobile agent that moves and avoids encountering network congestion situations. A system prototype has been constructed to implement the designed architecture. It has successfully demonstrated that the new design framework offers architecture flexibility, improves system reliability, and provides system scalability in handling a large number of service requests.