A provision aware proportional fair sharing three colour marker

Traffic conditioners enforce agreements between domains to allow service profiles to conform to subscribers Service Level Agreements. To ensure fairness in the network, these traffic conditioners should allocate bandwidth to subscribers according to their agreed contracted rate and share excess bandwidth in proportion to this agreed rate when the network is over or well provisioned. In instances where the network is under provisioned, the allocation of bandwidth to a subscriber should degrade in proportion to its agreed rate. In this paper a provision aware proportional fair sharing three colour marker is proposed to ensure that these fairness criteria are fulfilled for aggregated flows. Its main contributions are in achieving fairness in under provisioned networks and in the presence of UDP traffic whilst being insensitive to the number of flows in an aggregate. This is demonstrated through a quantitative simulation analysis and also exhibits improved performance over other aggregated approaches, including a recent proposal to provide fairness in under provisioned networks. These results infer that fairness can be achieved by considering the provision of the network in the design of the algorithm, by using separate marking algorithms for TCP and UDP traffic and by using an adaptive factor that mitigates sensitivity to the number of flows in an aggregate.