A Marked-based Web bandwidth management system

Abstract

The World Wide Web (WWW) is the most popular service of the Internet, which is used by millions of people in almost every country for their day-to-day operations. Since the demand for WWW is increasing rapidly, the infrastructures for this service such as bandwidth need to be developed and upgraded regularly. This is not affordable for developing countries like Sri Lanka, because of the cost and the technological deficiencies. Providing a satisfactory service to users by 'managing the existing bandwidth' is the best alternative for this. But it is very difficult to achieve both with the available bandwidth management mechanisms. We have designed and implemented a proxy-based system, which allows each user to request, and obtain a desired amount of bandwidth for web access. The server allocates the bandwidth for users considering the available bandwidth and demand. Bandwidth is priced dynamically based on the demand at any given time. The user is charged based on the bandwidth level and the duration of usage. This allows users in a bandwidth-constrained environment to prioritize their web usage, and encourages them to carry out bandwidth-intensive applications during off-peak hours. This user involvement in bandwidth allocation is the main innovation of this system. This feature was implemented by adding new functions to the Squid web cache server. These functions allow adding or removing IP addresses of users to the relevant delay pool of squid according to the user requested bandwidth. Users login to the proxy server through an intermediate server, which keeps the users accounts and login details. In addition to the user requested bandwidth allocation, this system provides user management and billing functions. According to our experience, this new system is highly suitable for the Internet Service Provides (ISPs) to offer a better quality user satisfied service while managing their available bandwidth resources.