Dynamic QoS: Automatically Modifying QoS Queue's Maximum Bandwidth Rate-Limit of Network Devices for Network Improvement

Abstract

The heterogeneous data traffic of today's network is a huge challenge to existing best-effort network technology, particularly in the context of large Ethernet, which handles hundreds to thousands of users. The existing conventional best-effort network technology is no longer efficient to handle the diversity of traffic types in the network and requires network management equipment such as Quality of Service (QOS). Usually, QOS is implemented on the gateway router. However, for better network performance and management, to guarantee high priority for sensitive traffic like video conferencing, Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), and streaming media within an internal network, it is nice to have QoS implemented on each router in the LAN network, starting from the access router to the gateway router. This paper is to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed dynamic QoS that has been developed and deployed in the LAN, purposely to provide adequate bandwidth for sensitive traffic when the network utilization is high and congested, by automatically modifying the QoS Queue's Maximum Bandwidth Rate-Limit of the best-effort traffic queue of the related router. The performance of the proposed developed dynamic QoS was evaluated via a comparison study before and after the dynamic QoS was presented in the network simulation environment that was built using Mininet. Results from the testing show that the developed dynamic QoS can improve the network's performance by automatically giving the appropriate bandwidth for sensitive traffic on the fly while needed/on demand.