Quality of Service over Specific Link Layers: state of the art report

The Integrated Services concept is proposed as an enhancement to the current Internet architecture, to provide a better Quality of Service (QoS) than that provided by the traditional Best-Effort service. The features of the Integrated Services are explained in this report. To support Integrated Services, certain requirements are posed on the underlying link layer. These requirements are studied by the Integrated Services over Specific Link Layers (ISSLL) IETF working group. The status of this ongoing research is reported in this document. To be more specific, the solutions to provide Integrated Services over ATM, IEEE 802 LAN technologies and low-bitrate links are evaluated in detail. The ISSLL working group has not yet studied the requirements, that are posed on the underlying link layer, when this link layer is wireless. Therefore, this state of the art report is extended with an identification of the requirements that are posed on the underlying wireless link, to provide differentiated Quality of Service

Joint buffer management and scheduling for input queued switches

Input queued (IQ) switches are highly scalable and they have been the focus of many studies from academia and industry. Many scheduling algorithms have been proposed for IQ switches. However, they do not consider the buffer space requirement inside an IQ switch that may render the scheduling algorithms inefficient in practical applications. In this dissertation, the Queue Length Proportional (QLP) algorithm is proposed for IQ switches. QLP considers both the buffer management and the scheduling mechanism to obtain the optimal allocation region for both bandwidth and buffer space according to real traffic load. In addition, this dissertation introduces the Queue Proportional Fairness (QPF) criterion, which employs the cell loss ratio as the fairness metric. The research in this dissertation will show that the utilization of network resources will be improved significantly with QPF. Furthermore, to support diverse Quality of Service (QoS) requirements of heterogeneous and bursty traffic, the Weighted Minmax algorithm (WMinmax) is proposed to efficiently and dynamically allocate network resources. Lastly, to support traffic with multiple priorities and also to handle the decouple problem in practice, this dissertation introduces the multiple dimension scheduling algorithm which aims to find the optimal scheduling region in the multiple Euclidean space

Dynamic bandwidth allocation in ATM networks

Includes bibliographical references.This thesis investigates bandwidth allocation methodologies to transport new emerging bursty traffic types in ATM networks. However, existing ATM traffic management solutions are not readily able to handle the inevitable problem of congestion as result of the bursty traffic from the new emerging services. This research basically addresses bandwidth allocation issues for bursty traffic by proposing and exploring the concept of dynamic bandwidth allocation and comparing it to the traditional static bandwidth allocation schemes

Stabilization of Max-Min Fair Networks without Per-Flow State

Let a flow be a sequence of packets sent from a source computer to a destination computer. Routers at the core of the Internet do not maintain any information about the flows that traverse them. This has allowed for great speeds at the routers, at the expense of providing only best-effort service. In this paper, we consider the problem of fairly allocating bandwidth to each flow. We assume some flows request a constant amount of bandwidth from the network. The bandwidth that remains is distributed fairly among the rest of the flows. The fairness sought after is max-min fairness, which assigns to each flow the largest possible bandwidth that avoids affecting other flows. The distinguishing factor to other approaches is that routers only maintain a constant amount of state, which is consistent with trends in the Internet (such as the proposed Differentiated Services Internet architecture). In addition, due to the need for high fault-tolerance in the Internet, we ensure our protocol is self-stabilizing, that is, it tolerates a wide variety of transient faults. Key words: networks stabilization, max-min fairness, quality of service, computer 1

Design of traffic shaper / scheduler for packet switches and DiffServ networks : algorithms and architectures

The convergence of communications, information, commerce and computing are creating a significant demand and opportunity for multimedia and multi-class communication services. In such environments, controlling the network behavior and guaranteeing the user\u27s quality of service is required. A flexible hierarchical sorting architecture which can function either as a traffic shaper or a scheduler according to the requirement of the traffic load is presented to meet the requirement. The core structure can be implemented as a hierarchical traffic shaper which can support a large number of connections with a wide variety of rates and burstiness without the loss of the granularity in cells\u27 conforming departure time. The hierarchical traffic shaper can implement the exact sorting scheme with a substantial reduced memory size by using two stages of timing queues, and with substantial reduction in complexity, without introducing any sorting inaccuracy. By setting a suitable threshold to the length of the departure queue and using a lookahead algorithm, the core structure can be converted to a hierarchical rateadaptive scheduler. Based on the traffic load, it can work as an exact sorting traffic shaper or a Generic Cell Rate Algorithm (GCRA) scheduler. Such a rate-adaptive scheduler can reduce the Cell Transfer Delay and the Maximum Memory Occupancy greatly while keeping the fairness in the bandwidth assignment which is the inherent characteristic of GCRA. By introducing a best-effort queue to accommodate besteffort traffic, the hierarchical sorting architecture can be changed to a near workconserving scheduler. It assigns remaining bandwidth to the best-effort traffic so that it improves the utilization, of the outlink while it guarantees the quality of service requirements of those services which require quality of service guarantees. The inherent flexibility of the hierarchical sorting architecture combined with intelligent algorithms determines its multiple functions. Its implementation not only can manage buffer and bandwidth resources effectively, but also does not require no more than off-the-shelf hardware technology. The correlation of the extra shaping delay and the rate of the connections is revealed, and an improved fair traffic shaping algorithm, Departure Event Driven plus Completing Service Time Resorting algorithm, is presented. The proposed algorithm introduces a resorting process into Departure Event Driven Traffic Shaping Algorithm to resolve the contention of multiple cells which are all eligible for transmission in the traffic shaper. By using the resorting process based on each connection\u27s rate, better fairness and flexibility in the bandwidth assignment for connections with wide range of rates can be given. A Dual Level Leaky Bucket Traffic Shaper(DLLBTS) architecture is proposed to be implemented at the edge nodes of Differentiated Services Networks in order to facilitate the quality of service management process. The proposed architecture can guarantee not only the class-based Service Level Agreement, but also the fair resource sharing among flows belonging to the same class. A simplified DLLBTS architecture is also given, which can achieve the goals of DLLBTS while maintain a very low implementation complexity so that it can be implemented with the current VLSI technology. In summary, the shaping and scheduling algorithms in the high speed packet switches and DiffServ networks are studied, and the intelligent implementation schemes are proposed for them

Minimizing queueing delays in computer networks

Ph.DDOCTOR OF PHILOSOPH

Dynamic bandwidth allocation in multi-class IP networks using utility functions.

PhDAbstact not availableFujitsu Telecommunications Europe Lt

Measurement-Driven Algorithm and System Design for Wireless and Datacenter Networks

The growing number of mobile devices and data-intensive applications pose unique challenges for wireless access networks as well as datacenter networks that enable modern cloud-based services. With the enormous increase in volume and complexity of traffic from applications such as video streaming and cloud computing, the interconnection networks have become a major performance bottleneck. In this thesis, we study algorithms and architectures spanning several layers of the networking protocol stack that enable and accelerate novel applications and that are easily deployable and scalable. The design of these algorithms and architectures is motivated by measurements and observations in real world or experimental testbeds. In the first part of this thesis, we address the challenge of wireless content delivery in crowded areas. We present the AMuSe system, whose objective is to enable scalable and adaptive WiFi multicast. AMuSe is based on accurate receiver feedback and incurs a small control overhead. This feedback information can be used by the multicast sender to optimize multicast service quality, e.g., by dynamically adjusting transmission bitrate. Specifically, we develop an algorithm for dynamic selection of a subset of the multicast receivers as feedback nodes which periodically send information about the channel quality to the multicast sender. Further, we describe the Multicast Dynamic Rate Adaptation (MuDRA) algorithm that utilizes AMuSe's feedback to optimally tune the physical layer multicast rate. MuDRA balances fast adaptation to channel conditions and stability, which is essential for multimedia applications. We implemented the AMuSe system on the ORBIT testbed and evaluated its performance in large groups with approximately 200 WiFi nodes. Our extensive experiments demonstrate that AMuSe can provide accurate feedback in a dense multicast environment. It outperforms several alternatives even in the case of external interference and changing network conditions. Further, our experimental evaluation of MuDRA on the ORBIT testbed shows that MuDRA outperforms other schemes and supports high throughput multicast flows to hundreds of nodes while meeting quality requirements. As an example application, MuDRA can support multiple high quality video streams, where 90% of the nodes report excellent or very good video quality. Next, we specifically focus on ensuring high Quality of Experience (QoE) for video streaming over WiFi multicast. We formulate the problem of joint adaptation of multicast transmission rate and video rate for ensuring high video QoE as a utility maximization problem and propose an online control algorithm called DYVR which is based on Lyapunov optimization techniques. We evaluated the performance of DYVR through analysis, simulations, and experiments using a testbed composed of Android devices and o the shelf APs. Our evaluation shows that DYVR can ensure high video rates while guaranteeing a low but acceptable number of segment losses, buffer underflows, and video rate switches. We leverage the lessons learnt from AMuSe for WiFi to address the performance issues with LTE evolved Multimedia Broadcast/Multicast Service (eMBMS). We present the Dynamic Monitoring (DyMo) system which provides low-overhead and real-time feedback about eMBMS performance. DyMo employs eMBMS for broadcasting instructions which indicate the reporting rates as a function of the observed Quality of Service (QoS) for each UE. This simple feedback mechanism collects very limited QoS reports which can be used for network optimization. We evaluated the performance of DyMo analytically and via simulations. DyMo infers the optimal eMBMS settings with extremely low overhead, while meeting strict QoS requirements under different UE mobility patterns and presence of network component failures. In the second part of the thesis, we study datacenter networks which are key enablers of the end-user applications such as video streaming and storage. Datacenter applications such as distributed file systems, one-to-many virtual machine migrations, and large-scale data processing involve bulk multicast flows. We propose a hardware and software system for enabling physical layer optical multicast in datacenter networks using passive optical splitters. We built a prototype and developed a simulation environment to evaluate the performance of the system for bulk multicasting. Our evaluation shows that the optical multicast architecture can achieve higher throughput and lower latency than IP multicast and peer-to-peer multicast schemes with lower switching energy consumption. Finally, we study the problem of congestion control in datacenter networks. Quantized Congestion Control (QCN), a switch-supported standard, utilizes direct multi-bit feedback from the network for hardware rate limiting. Although QCN has been shown to be fast-reacting and effective, being a Layer-2 technology limits its adoption in IP-routed Layer 3 datacenters. We address several design challenges to overcome QCN feedback's Layer- 2 limitation and use it to design window-based congestion control (QCN-CC) and load balancing (QCN-LB) schemes. Our extensive simulations, based on real world workloads, demonstrate the advantages of explicit, multi-bit congestion feedback, especially in a typical environment where intra-datacenter traffic with short Round Trip Times (RTT: tens of s) run in conjunction with web-facing traffic with long RTTs (tens of milliseconds)