Enhancing QoS in a University Network by using Containerized Generic Cache

Abstract

Ubiquitous access and enhanced Internet speeds have paved ways for online educational reforms at a large scale. There has been a widespread adoption of modern educational applications, ranging from interactive applets, video lessons and online quizzes to remotely conducting laboratory experiments. Consequently, there is a demand to provision more bandwidth to satisfy the users expectations. In this paper, we propose an approach to enhance the Quality of Service (QoS) in a University campus network and efficiently utilize the available bandwidth. Typically within a University, some requests are similar e.g., operating system updates, Linux package installs, Python pip packages and others. These are huge data transfer requests ranging from Megabytes to Gigabytes, and consume a large amount of bandwidth on external access links to the Internet. Redundant requests of this nature from a large user base lead to enormous wastage of bandwidth. The proposed approach overcomes this concern by setting up a containerized forward proxy with a generic cache for popular traffic in the University. Our experiments on a live network at National Institute of Technology Karnataka, Surathkal show that a large number of redundant requests can be successfully served from this Virtualized Network Function (VNF), thereby enhancing the QoS and efficiently utilizing the available bandwidth. The proposed system is able to reduce the latency by over 60% and saves 34GB of data per day on an average. Although the proposed approach is tested in a University environment in this work, it is applicable for other caching requirements with minor modifications. Moreover, since this cache is implemented as a VNF, it is portable and easy to deploy. © 2020 IEEE.