Traffic engineering for provisioning VPNs with time-varying bandwidth requirements

Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) provide customers with a secure and manageable communication environment. The allocation of bandwidth for VPNs to meet the requirements specified by customers has become one of the most important research issues in the field of traffic engineering. Several traffic engineering algorithms have been proposed for provisioning VPNs. A recently proposed VPN bandwidth specification model, called hose model, provides customers with the flexibility to specify the bandwidth requirement of a VPN. In this paper, we first show that by exploiting time discretization in bandwidth specification, performance achieved by traffic engineering algorithms can be improved significantly. We then proposed a novel VPN bandwidth specification mode, called Slotted-Hose (S-Hose) model, as well as a novel traffic engineering algorithm for the provisioning VPNs. According to simulation results reported in this paper, our algorithms outperform previous proposed approaches.