The interaction between TCP and traffic shapers - clever alternatives to the leaky bucket

The Differentiated Services (DiffServ) architecture has been defined for implementing scalable service differentiation in the Internet. DiffServ edge routers employ traffic conditioners that contain meter, marker and shaper functionalities. The way of traffic shaping in traffic conditioners is an open issue and we believe, using intelligent shaping algorithms instead of leaky bucket algorithms (LBA) could increase the network performance significantly. We present two new shaping algorithms for variable packet size networks that emit packet streams which behave in a certain sense better than Poisson streams and compare them to the leaky bucket algorithm (LBA). The introduced shaping algorithms are proven to perform better than LBA and furthermore provide a means to network providers to answer the questions of network dimensioning.