Cooperative ISP traffic shaping schemes in broadband shared access networks

Traffic shaping is a mechanism used by Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to limit subscribers´ traffic based on their service contracts. This paper investigates the current implementation of traffic shaping based on the token bucket filter (TBF), discusses its advantages and disadvantages, and proposes a cooperative TBF that can improve subscribers´ quality of service (QoS)/quality of experience (QoE) without compromising business aspects of the service contract model by proportionally allocating excess bandwidth from inactive subscribers to active ones based on the long-term bandwidths per their service contracts.