Results on the Evaluation of CrossKey's, Dyband Product for Traffic Shaping Performance

This report presents results on the evaluation of the Dyband product from CrossKeys Systems Corporation. The product is Dyband Dynamic Bandwidth Management System, Release 1.2. The evaluation was performed in the summer of 2000 in the PC/LAN laboratory of the MITRE Corporation in Reston, VA. This work was performed under the auspice of the mission-oriented investigation and experimentation (MOIE) entitled "Operational Dynamics of Quality of Service (QoS)", an Army MOIE sponsored by the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) for fiscal year 2000.

Test results of the Dyband system evaluation indicate that the Dyband can provide effective bandwidth management and network monitoring capabilities. Dyband reacts quickly to congested conditions on access lines by controlling the transfer rates of individual hosts and making fair allocation of bandwidth according to pre-specified profiles and policies. Dyband achieves real-time bandwidth control by using a 10 milliseconds (ms) cycle for assessing traffic flow and by applying two congestion management mechanisms: Dynamic Rate Controls and Dynamic Priorities. These dynamic capabilities proved to be very effective in controlling congestion and offering preferential service to hosts transmitting higher priority applications. In addition, Dyband's real-time network monitoring feature provides network managers with a useful insight into network performance.