QoS Aware Dynamic Flow Control in Virtual Private Network

In recent years, IP based Virtual Private Networks (IP-VPNs) which enables enterprises to dynamically create and manage privately owned virtual networks over the public networking infrastructure have drawn significant attention both from researchers and industry IT stakeholders. One of the major research challenges in this dynamic scenario is to develop a fair flow control mechanism. This flow control problem could be partitioned into two sections, intra-VPN fairness control (internal control of aggregate flows) and inter-VPN fairness control (external control of individual sources by signals emanating from edge routers) [1]. External flow control becomes very complicated for Quality of Service (QoS) aware flows where each flow has a different minimum guaranteed rate. In this paper, firstly, we present the design of a novel QoS-aware external flow control algorithm for QoS aware flows in virtual private networks, and secondly, we present extensive NS-2 simulation results for our flow control algorithm. Simulation result shows that our flow control mechanism can efficiently maximise the bandwidth utilisation while maintaining guaranteed QoS for each individual flow.