Adaptive Switching PCQ-HTB Algorithms for Bandwidth Management in RouterOS

Abstract

The performance of a network is affected by the the number of clients, in which increase of the bandwith capacity does not always guarantee the quality improvement of a network services. Clients obtain proper bandwidth which is managed at the network layer as a software-based congestion control method to control the flow and packets number in the network. Bandwidth management is the process of measuring and controlling the communications (traffic, packets) on a network link, to avoid filling the link to capacity or overfilling the link, which would result in network congestion and poor performance of the network. On the RouterOS, it has Per Connection Queue (PCQ) and Hierarchical Token Bucket (HTB) bandwidth management algorithm. The PCQ is a non-priority class, in contrary to the HTB. This research focuses on adaptive switching PCQ - HTB bandwidth management algorithms on RouterOS. The weaknesses and advantages of these two algorithms are analyzed in order to propose an adaptive switching mechanisms to organize the bandwidth usage. Results show that this adaptive switching method can provide enough access for highest priority clients without causing them dominating the bandwidth aggressively or blocking the bandwidth access to the lowest priority clients. Thus, the proposed algorithm can be a suitable alternative bandwidth management in a typical network to satisfy priority classes clients while allowing non-priority clients adequate access the network.