Traffic shaping for enabling less-than-best effort services at the edges of broadband connections

Broadband connection sharing constitutes a network resource pooling technique that could evolve toward supporting the establishment of the "Free Internet for All" notion. This technique could be implemented through the User-Provided Network model in which any end-user device (e.g. ADSL Access Points) could behave as supplier of Internet connectivity. In this paper, the behavior of such a system is investigated from a queue-management perspective. A numerical analysis that takes into consideration both the high variability of broadband link speeds and different packet-size distributions is presented. Based on the results, we propose a hybrid packet-scheduling scheme that enables the application of Less-than-Best Effort services at the connection edges.