Application centric autonomic BW control in utility computing

Abstract

QoS and congestion performance are crucial to good application performance in a utility computing environment. Unfortunately, proper IP QoS setup is very complex and is either ignored completely or set rather simplistically. It is well known that without an elaborate end to end QoS setup, TCP connections simply divide up the available excess bandwidth equally among themselves under congestion. In this paper we propose autonomic mechanisms that determine BW requirements of various flows of an application and maintain them in appropriate proportion even during congestion. The estimations are done dynamically and thus can easily track changing application requirements. The paper shows that the scheme not only yields close to desired bandwidth allocation, but also significantly reduces packet losses.