Bandwidth Management and Monitoring for Community Networks

This paper describes a custom-built system to replace existing routing solutions within an identified community network. The community network in question shares a VSAT Internet connection to provide Internet access to a number of schools and their surrounding communities. This connection provides a limited resource which needs to be managed in order to ensure equitable use by members of the community. The community network originally lacked any form of bandwidth management or monitoring which often resulted in unfair use and abuse. The solution implemented is based on a client-server architecture. The Community Access Points (CAPs) are the client components which are located at each school; providing the computers and servers with access to the rest of the community network and the Internet. These nodes also perform a number of monitoring tasks for the computers at the schools. The server component is the Access Concentrator (AC) and connects the CAPs together using encrypted and authenticated PPPoE tunnels. The AC performs several additional monitoring functions, both on the individual links and on the upstream Internet connection. The AC provides a means of effectively and centrally managing and allocating Internet bandwidth between the schools. The system that was developed has a number of features, including Quality of Service adjustments limiting network usage and fairly billing each school for their Internet use. The system provides an effective means for sharing bandwidth between users in a community network.