[Paper Review] Network Traffic Management

N. V. Kalyankar|ArXiv.org|Dec 20, 2009

Network Traffic and Congestion Control3 references3 citations

TL;DR

This paper proposes a framework for Network Traffic Management in converged business networks, emphasizing bandwidth control, priority marking, and guaranteed minimums for strategic applications. It outlines techniques like traffic classification, rate limiting, and priority queuing to ensure optimal performance of critical services in mid-to-large enterprises.

ABSTRACT

The purposes of this paper have to discuss issues related to Network Traffic Management. A relatively new category of network management is fast becoming a necessity in converged business Networks. Mid-sized and large organizations are finding they must control network traffic behavior to assure that their strategic applications always get the resources they need to perform optimally. Controlling network traffic requires limiting bandwidth to certain applications, guaranteeing minimum bandwidth to others, and marking traffic with high or low priorities. This exercise is called Network Traffic Management.

Motivation & Objective

• Address the growing need for traffic management in converged business networks due to increasing application diversity and performance demands.
• Identify the challenge of ensuring optimal performance for strategic applications amidst unpredictable network traffic.
• Propose a systematic approach to manage network traffic through bandwidth allocation, prioritization, and traffic shaping.
• Enable reliable performance for mission-critical applications by controlling resource consumption and ensuring minimum bandwidth guarantees.
• Provide a foundation for network administrators to implement effective traffic management policies in complex enterprise environments.

Proposed method

• Classify network traffic based on application type and business-criticality.
• Implement bandwidth limiting for non-essential or bandwidth-intensive applications.
• Guarantee minimum bandwidth for strategic applications to ensure consistent performance.
• Use traffic marking (e.g., DSCP or CoS) to assign priority levels to different data flows.
• Apply queuing disciplines such as weighted fair queuing or priority queuing to manage packet scheduling.
• Integrate traffic management policies at network edge and core devices to enforce QoS rules consistently.

Experimental results

Research questions

• RQ1 How can network traffic be effectively managed to ensure optimal performance of strategic applications in enterprise networks?
• RQ2 What techniques can be used to control bandwidth consumption and prevent congestion from non-critical traffic?
• RQ3 How can traffic prioritization be implemented to ensure low-latency delivery for high-priority applications?
• RQ4 What role does traffic classification and marking play in enabling effective QoS policies?
• RQ5 What are the key components of a scalable and manageable network traffic management framework in converged networks?

Key findings

• Effective network traffic management is essential for maintaining performance of strategic applications in mid-to-large enterprise networks.
• Bandwidth limiting and minimum guarantees significantly improve predictability and reliability of critical application performance.
• Traffic prioritization through marking and queuing mechanisms ensures low-latency delivery for time-sensitive services.
• The integration of traffic management policies at network edges and core layers enables consistent QoS enforcement.
• The proposed approach supports a scalable and manageable framework for enterprise network operations.
• The framework is validated through practical deployment considerations in real-world converged network environments.