Scalable IP-VPN flow control mechanism supporting arbitrary fairness criteria. Part 1. Architecture design

In recent years, IP-based virtual private networks (IP-VPNs), which provide a virtual privately owned network over an IP network, have attracted attention. With existing IP-VPNs, however, there is a serious problem that fairness among IP-VPN customers is not satisfied. In this paper, we first discuss design objectives of a control mechanism for achieving fair IP-VPN services: achieving inter-VPN fairness, achieving intra-VPN fairness, easy deployment into existing IP networks, and achieving a high scalability. We then propose an IP-VPN fairness control called 12FVC (inter-and intra-VPN fairness control) for realizing a fair IP-VPN service in a scalable way. The core of 12VFC is an AIMD (additive increase and multiplicative decrease) window flow control operating among IP-VPN service provider's edge routers. 12VFC has the advantage that an IP-VPN service provider can arbitrarily specify inter-VPN fairness criteria by utilizing analytic results of AIMD window flow control. Moreover, 12VFC can be easily deployed into existing IP networks by simply modifying edge routers. Through several simulation experiments, we demonstrate that 12VFC realizes both inter-VPN fairness and intra-VPN fairness with extremely high accuracy.