A new bandwidth allocation strategy considering the network applications

Resource competition, a serious problem in many actual networks, largely influence the network performance and may lead to network congestion. The allocation of link's bandwidth resource is a key process to relieve the situation. Researchers have put forward some strategies to improve the network capacity. They thought that the allocation strategies were determined by the importance of each link which was described by the link's betweenness or node's degree. However, the structure of network cannot describe accurately the traffic distribution. In this paper, we attempt to concern the applications, which affect the traffic distribution, to investigate a new bandwidth allocation strategy. We firstly consider three kinds of application process to define the importance of each link, and based on the importance of each link an allocation formula is presented. Then an optimal model aiming at network average delay is proposed and we also obtain the optimal solution. Finally, simulation results show the lower average delay when the proposed bandwidth allocation strategy compared to the average bandwidth allocation strategy, the degree-based bandwidth allocation strategy and the betweenness-based strategy. This strategy conforms to the practical applications especially the communication networks as well as transport networks, so it can provide an idea for the service providers to design or optimize the networks.