IP Traffic Optimization?

sireenmalik asks: "As part of Network Management Systems development team i am developing an IP traffic optimizer. There are both online optimization(non-deterministic) and offline optimization algorithms (deterministic). The question is if we do Online optimization on the flows in real-time, is Offline Optimization afterwards worth it, at all? Has anyone ever made quantitative measurements? Any studies undertaken? What is the improvement in network utilization? Is it significant? Any comments?"

Comments

Out of curiosity

[SuiteSisterMary]

If you're doing both anyway, why don't you, umm, do the measurements yourself? Because, as I'm sure you know, any conclusions drawn by anybody else will only very generally apply to any specific set up you might have.

Commercial or just for research?

[teambpsi]

Is this a project for which your company is hoping to generate revenue from ? Or is this "we have too much free time and money in our budget and should spend it here" ;)

Either way I'd suggest you you look at the 'competition' -- surely you would glean a lot of very useful information from the whitepapers of people like Packeteer Corp

Or if you don't have the bazillion dollars to buy their products, try a really nifty software only solution from the folks at Emerging Technologies -- their bandwidth manager is really pretty cool -- we use it to control our co-location client traffic.

Ultimately, any kind of traffic shaping you do is really about Quality of Service (QoS) issues.