Dynamic bandwidth management in virtual private networks

This paper analyses the problem of bandwidth management for the Internet in the environment of virtual private networks (VPNs). A VPN is a private net work constructed within a public network infrastructure. In recent years, e specially with the growing interest in electronic commerce, VPNs have exper ienced a dramatic growth. A large amount of work is being done on the impro vement of the performance of VPNs, mainly concerning their security. Much l ess attention has been given to the resource management issues. Resource ma nagement should be simple to implement and optimally designed to maximise t he network performance. We analyse partitioning of network resources, prima rily bandwidth, in order to isolate the communication of families of users and at the same time maximise the performance. This work is based on the dy namic bandwidth partitioning scheme, which has been described previously(8, 9). The main feature of this scheme is that it is user-oriented; the bandwi dth is allocated in a way that maximises the users' utility. We extend the analysis of the scheme in this paper, by presenting the motivation for hier archical dynamic bandwidth partitioning, which addresses dynamic bandwidth allocation in the VPN environment.