Ping Trunking: A Vegas-Like Congestion Control Mechanism for Aggregated Traffic

We present a new edge-to-edge management technique, called Ping Trunking, that can provide soft service guarantees to aggregated traffic. A Ping trunk is an aggregate traffic stream that flows between two nodes in a network at a rate dynamically determined by a Vegas-like congestion control mechanism. A management connection associated to each trunk is in charge of regulating the user data transmission rate. Due to this managing, trunks are able to probe for available bandwidth adapting themselves to changing network conditions in accordance with their subscribed target rates. We demonstrate analytically and through simulation experiments the effectiveness of our proposal.