Adaptive traffic-shaping

Bounding the transmission latency of a priority flow with a standard traffic-shaper is typically accomplished by applying worst-case analysis. The network designer-often having limited detailed knowledge of the application data, its host protocol configuration, and full network path overhead-rightfully assumes maximum protocol overhead, largest possible data load, zero-gain compression, etc. The consequence of this practice is a catastrophic impact on traffic that competes with the priority flow under anemic network conditions. The work presented here provides an alternative to static traffic-shaping that guarantees bandwidth availability to priority flows while minimizing their impact on competing traffic. An adaptive traffic-shaper implements algorithms that perform online analysis of the stochastic character of network traffic and ldquolearnsrdquo to optimize total quality of service while respecting transmission constraints on priority flows.