A centralized approach to bandwidth allocation and connection management in switched Lans

Abstract

The issue of centralized bandwidth control and connection management in a small LAN of switches is explored in this project. The LAN considered here is a LAN of switches which are connected through a fiber optic medium. A centralized connection manager switch manages the bandwidth at any link of a switch and allocates connections. This switch is connected to every network switch through a dedicated link and hence maintains an overall image of the network at any instant. The connection manager ensures that resource reservation is resorted to when the network load exceeds a specified threshold. Real time connections are handled by a compulsory resource reservation protocol to ensure that the deadlines are always met. Non-real time connections are handled using OSPF technology tin the network threshold is reached beyond which they are passed through resource reservation. A performance analysis of this network is performed taking into account the number of connections requested, number of non-real time connections accepted, number of real time connections accepted, acceptance ratio, maximum and average utilization and the corresponding curves are plotted. It can be seen that as the threshold utilization increases, the network becomes more and more non-real time as non-real time connections start to use more of the network. To ensure proper network utilization, the threshold utilization value should be set between 30% and 60%.