WAN bandwidth remains a constrained resource that is economically infeasible to substantially overprovision. Hence, it is important to allocate capacity according to service priority and based on the incremental value of additional allocation. For example, it may be the highest priority for one service to receive Gb/s of bandwidth but upon reaching such an allocation, incremental priority may drop sharply favoring allocation to other services. Motivated by the observation that individual ows with xed priority may not be the ideal basis for bandwidth allocation, we present the design and implementation of Bandwidth Enforcer (BwE), a global, hierarchical bandwidth allocation infrastructure. BwE supports: i) service-level bandwidth allocation following prioritized bandwidth functions where a service can represent an arbitrary collection of ows, ii) independent allocation and delegation policies according to user-de ned hierarchy, all accounting for a global view of bandwidth and failure conditions, iii) multi-path forwarding common in tra cengineered networks, and iv) a central administrative point to override (perhaps faulty) policy during exceptional conditions. BwE has delivered more service-e cient bandwidth utilization and simpler management in production for multiple years.

WAN bandwidth remains a constrained resource that is economically infeasible to substantially overprovision. Hence, it is important to allocate capacity according to service priority and based on the incremental value of additional allocation. For example, it may be the highest priority for one service to receive Gb/s of bandwidth but upon reaching such an allocation, incremental priority may drop sharply favoring allocation to other services. Motivated by the observation that individual ows with xed priority may not be the ideal basis for bandwidth allocation, we present the design and implementation of Bandwidth Enforcer (BwE), a global, hierarchical bandwidth allocation infrastructure. BwE supports: i) service-level bandwidth allocation following prioritized bandwidth functions where a service can represent an arbitrary collection of ows, ii) independent allocation and delegation policies according to user-de ned hierarchy, all accounting for a global view of bandwidth and failure conditions, iii) multi-path forwarding common in tra cengineered networks, and iv) a central administrative point to override (perhaps faulty) policy during exceptional conditions. BwE has delivered more service-e cient bandwidth utilization and simpler management in production for multiple years.