A Study of Bandwidth Management Techniques for the Implementation of Quality of Service in Internet Protocol Networks

Bandwidth being a limited and expensive resource overprovisioning is not the viable option in this tough economic times. However management of the available bandwidth if implemented well can improve quality of experience among users in the network. In this paper a literature review of the various bandwidth management techniques available based on the TCP/IP model has been done. The results indicate those techniques based on network access layer are easy to implement while those in the network layer introduce additional overhead when used .Further the results shows that at the network layer and transport layer there is room for a lot of flexibility. At the network layer there could be policies implemented using routers to manage bandwidth dynamically. Even though there could be additional overhead for running the algorthim,a well-designed algorithm would require negligible computation time. At the transport layer varying window sizes could be used to dynamically adjust bandwidth. However the application layer uses bandwidth caps which are static and therefore not ideal for handling spikes in bandwidth demand. It is expected that the findings this paper will provide insights and guidelines to systems administrators when choosing appropriate bandwidth management technique to use.