Designing Dynamic Bandwidth Allocation Algorithm: the Case of Addis Ababa University Network (Aaunet)
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Date
2018-01-04
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Addis Ababa University
Abstract
Addis Ababa University (AAU) needs the Internet for many activities including learning, teaching, and publication. To facilitate those activities the university community uses different applications on Internet. Each applications have different bandwidth requirements, some of which are bandwidth greedy. Student also uses those application to access different resources on Internet. High student enrolments less supervised and more freedom of time to surf on Internet creates a high bandwidth demand and contribute to the slowness of the Internet connection making it ineffective to access academic resources. This is particularly true in academic institutes in developing countries. Instead of optimizing the existing bandwidth those Institutes responds to a slow Internet connection by adding more bandwidth which is uneconomical and a temporary solution. Addis Ababa University is not different from this scenario. This study was undertaken to find a way of allocating a decent amount of bandwidth to users. Dynamic bandwidth allocation algorithm was developed, in particular, an algorithm that allocates bandwidth based on user demand and bandwidth sharing. The prototype was developed to evaluate the algorithm and the requirements for algorithm development was collected from Addis Ababa University’s main campus network gateway using purposive sampling. The prototype was evaluated on simulated environment.
Based on the Proxy logs statistics, there are unbalanced usage of Internet between users in the university. The result has shown that 2.7% of the Internet was used only by 10 users and most of those users generate a network traffic of 28GB and above in a single day with the highest of 42.92GB and a total of 298.31 GB of data, which requires for bandwidth management.
To solve an unbalanced usage of Internet bandwidth, a dynamic bandwidth allocation algorithm was designed which classify users into different classes and assigned bandwidth for the class. The users in that specific class inherit the allocated bandwidth rate, with the option of extended the limit of usage if there is a bandwidth in the bucket. The algorithm also guarantee minimum bandwidth rate for every users who joins the network.
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Dynamic Bandwidth allocation, Bandwidth Sharing, and network traffic analysis.