File:An evaluation of best effort traffic management of server and agent based active network management (SAAM) architecture (IA anevaluationofbe109451149).pdf

The Server and Agent-based Active Network Management (SAAM) architecture was initially designed to work with the next generation Internet where increasingly sophisticated applications will require QoS guarantees. Although such QoS traffic is growing in volume, Best Effort traffic, which does not require QoS guarantees, needs to be supported for foreseeable future. Thus, SAAM must handle Best Effort traffic as well as QoS traffic. A Best Effort traffic management algorithm was developed for SAAM recently to take advantage of the abilities of the SAAM server. However, this algorithm has not been evaluated quantitatively. This thesis conducts experiments to compare the performance of the Best Effort traffic management scheme of the SAAM architecture against the well known MPLS Adaptive Traffic Engineering (MATE) Algorithm. A couple of realistic network topologies were used. The results show while SAAM may not perform as well as MATE with a fixed set of paths, using SAAM's dynamic path deployment functionality allows the load to be distributed across more parts of the network, thus achieving better performance than MATE. Much of the effort was spent on implementing the MATE algorithm in SAAM. Some modifications were also made to the SAAM code based on the experimental results to increase the performance of SAAM's Best Effort solution.