A new scheme for traffic estimation and resource allocation for bandwidth brokers T. Anjali a, * , C. Scoglio a , G. Uhl b a Broadband and Wireless Networking Laboratory, School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA 30332, USA b Swales Aerospace & NASA Goddard, Beltsville, MD 20705, USA Received 1 May 2002; received in revised form 16 October 2002; accepted 14 November 2002 Responsible Editor: C. Douligeris Abstract This paper is motivated by the concern of a multi-service network provider who plans to offer quality of service guarantees to users. A bandwidth broker acts as the resource manager for each network provider. Neighboring bandwidth brokers communicate with each other to establish inter-domain resource reservation agreements. Con- ventional approaches for resource allocation rely on pre-determined traffic characteristics. If allocation follows the traffic demand very tightly, the resource usage is efficient but leads to frequent modifications of the reservations. This would lead to increased inter-bandwidth-broker signaling in order to propagate the changes to all the concerned networks. Contrarily, if large cushions are allowed in the reservations, the modifications are far spaced in time but the resource usage becomes highly inefficient. In this paper, a new scheme for estimating the traffic on an inter-domain link and forecasting its capacity requirement, based on a measurement of the current usage, is proposed. The method allows an efficient resource utilization while keeping the number of reservation modifications to low values. Ó 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved. Keywords: Bandwidth broker; Resource allocation; Resource provisioning; Capacity reservation; Traffic estimation; Bandwidth usage 1. Introduction There is a growing demand for guaranteed bandwidth and latency by users of the present day Internet. These guarantees, called as quality of service (QoS), are made up of three basic compo- nents from a routerÕs point, namely • defining packet treatment classes, • specifying the amount of resources for each class, • sorting incoming packets into respective classes. Differentiated services concept [1] has been proposed as an architecture to provide these QoS guarantees in the Internet. It specifies traffic classes (per hop behaviors, PHBs) and a mechanism to classify incoming packets (based on the differenti- ated services code point in each packet). It thus removes maintenance of state in the core routers in * Corresponding author. E-mail addresses: tricha@ece.gatech.edu (T. Anjali), cate- rina@ece.gatech.edu (C. Scoglio), uhl@rattler.gsfc.nasa.gov (G. Uhl). 1389-1286/03/$ - see front matter Ó 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/S1389-1286(02)00438-3 Computer Networks 41 (2003) 761–777 www.elsevier.com/locate/comnet