A traffic shaping model for optimizing network operations

The management of technology in multi-service computer networks, such as university networks, has become a challenge with the explosive growth of entertainment oriented peer-to-peer (P2P) traffic. Traffic shaping is one of the tools used to manage bandwidth to improve system performance by allocating bandwidth between P2P and non-peer-to-peer (NP2P) traffic. We present a model for traffic shaping and bandwidth management that considers the trade-offs from allocating different amounts of bandwidths for different application categories and use data from a university network. The current policy allocates varying bandwidths over the day to P2P and NP2P traffic to reflect the importance of not letting entertainment based traffic choke the network during the day time at the expense of the more important traffic, such as Web traffic. We highlight the difficulties in obtaining data in the form required for analysis, and the need to estimate demand for allocations not covered by current policy. We present a goal programming model for this estimation task. We also model the traffic shaping problem as a Markov decision process and develop an algorithm for determining the optimal bandwidth allocation to maximize the utility of all users. Finally we use a numerical example to illustrate our approach.