Transport Control Protocol (TCP) over Optical Burst Switched Networks

Transport Control Protocol (TCP) is the dominant protocol in modern communication networks, in which the issues of reliability, flow, and congestion control must be handled efficiently. This thesis studies the impact of the next-generation bufferless optical burst-switched (OBS) networks on the performance of TCP congestion-control implementations (i.e., dropping-based, explicit-notification-based, and delay-based). The burst contention phenomenon caused by the buffer-less nature of OBS occurs randomly and has a negative impact on dropping-based TCP since it causes a false indication of network congestion that leads to improper reaction on a burst drop event. In this thesis we study the impact of these random burst losses on dropping-based TCP throughput. We introduce a novel congestion control scheme for TCP over OBS networks, called Statistical Additive Increase Multiplicative Decrease (SAIMD). SAIMD maintains and analyzes a number of previous round trip times (RTTs) at the TCP senders in order to identify the confidence with which a packet-loss event is due to network congestion. The confidence is derived by positioning short-term RTT in the spectrum of long-term historical RTTs. The derived confidence corresponding to the packet loss is then taken in to account by the policy developed for TCP congestion-window adjustment. For explicit-notification TCP, we propose a new TCP implementation over OBS networks, called TCP with Explicit Burst Loss Contention Notification (TCP-BCL). We examine the throughput performance of a number of representative TCP implementations over OBS networks, and analyze the TCP performance degradation due to the misinterpretation of timeout and packet-loss events. We also demonstrate that the proposed TCP-BCL scheme can counter the negative effect of OBS burst losses and is superior to conventional TCP architectures in OBS networks. For delay-based TCP, we observe that this type of TCP implementation cannot detect network congestion when deployed over typical OBS networks since RTT fluctuations are minor. Also, delay-based TCP can suffer from falsely detecting network congestion when the underlying OBS network provides burst retransmission and/or deflection. Due to the fact that burst retransmission and deflection schemes introduce additional delays for bursts that are retransmitted or deflected, TCP cannot determine whether this sudden delay is due to network congestion or simply to burst recovery at the OBS layer. In this thesis we study the behaviour of delay-based TCP Vegas over OBS networks, and propose a version of threshold-based TCP Vegas that is suitable for the characteristics of OBS networks. The threshold-based TCP Vegas is able to distinguish increases in packet delay due to network congestion from burst contention at low traffic loads. The evolution of OBS technology is highly coupled with its ability to support upper-layer applications. Without fully understanding the burst transmission behaviour and the associated impact on the TCP congestion-control mechanism, it will be difficult to exploit the advantages of OBS networks fully

STCP: A New Transport Protocol for High-Speed Networks

Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) is the dominant transport protocol today and likely to be adopted in future high‐speed and optical networks. A number of literature works have been done to modify or tune the Additive Increase Multiplicative Decrease (AIMD) principle in TCP to enhance the network performance. In this work, to efficiently take advantage of the available high bandwidth from the high‐speed and optical infrastructures, we propose a Stratified TCP (STCP) employing parallel virtual transmission layers in high‐speed networks. In this technique, the AIMD principle of TCP is modified to make more aggressive and efficient probing of the available link bandwidth, which in turn increases the performance. Simulation results show that STCP offers a considerable improvement in performance when compared with other TCP variants such as the conventional TCP protocol and Layered TCP (LTCP)

Loss-free architectures in optical burst switched networks for a reliable and dynamic optical layer

For the last three decades, the optical fiber has been a quite systematic response to dimensioning issues in the Internet. Originally restricted to long haul networks, the optical network has gradually descended the network hierarchy to discard the bottlenecks. In the 90's, metropolitan networks became optical. Today, optical fibers are deployed in access networks and reach the users. In a near future, besides wireless access and local area networks, all networks in the network hierarchy may be made of fibers, in order to support current services (HDTV) and the emergence of new applications (3D-TV newly commercialized in USA). The deployment of such greedy applications will initiate an upward upgrade. The first step may be the Metropolitan Area Networks (MANs), not only because of the traffic growth, but also because of the variety of served applications, each with a specific traffic profile. The current optical layer is of mitigated efficiency, dealing with unforeseen events. The lack of reactivity is mainly due to the slow switching devices: any on-line decision of the optical layer is delayed by the configuration of the. devices. When the optical network has been extended in the MANs, a lot of efforts has been deployed to improve the reactivity of the optical layer. The Optical Circuit Switching paradigm (OCS) has been improved but it ultimately relies on off-line configuration of the optical devices. Optical Burst Switching (OBS) can be viewed as a highly flexible evolution of OCS, that operates five order of magnitude faster. Within this 'architecture, the loss-free guaranty can be abandoned in order to improve the reactivity of the optical layer. Indeed, reliability and reactivity appear as antagonists properties and getting closer to either of them mitigates the other. This thesis aims at proposing a solution to achieve reliable transmission over a dynamic optical layer. Focusing on OBS networks, our objective is to solve the contention issue without mitigating the reactivity. After the consideration of contention avoidance mechanisms with routing constraints similar as in OCS networks, we investigate the reactive solutions that intend to solve the contentions. None of the available contention resolution scheme can ensure the 100% efficiency that leads to loss-free transmission. An attractive solution is the recourse to electrical buffering, but it is notoriously disregarded because (1) it may highly impact the delays and (2) loss can occur due to buffer overflows. The efficiency of translucent architectures thus highly depends on the buffer availability, that can be improved by reducing the time spent in the buffers and the contention rate. We show that traffic grooming can highly reduce the emission delay, and consequently the buffer occupancy. In a first architecture, traffic grooming is enabled by a translucent core node architecture, capable to re-aggregate incoming bursts. The re-aggregation is mandatory to "de-groom" the bursts in the core network (i.e., to demultiplex the content of a burst). On the one hand, the re-aggregation highly reduces the loss probability, but on the other hand, it absorbs the benefits of traffic grooming. Finally, dynamic access to re-aggregation for contention resolution, despite the significant reduction of the contention rate, dramatically impacts the end-to-end delay and the memory requirement. We thus propose a second architecture, called CAROBS, that exploits traffic grooming in the optical domain. This framework is fully dynamic and can be used jointly with our translucent architecture that performs re-aggregation. As the (de)grooming operations do not involve re-aggregation, the translucent module can be restricted to contention resolution. As a result, the volume of data submitted to re-aggregation is drastically reduced and loss-free transmission can be reached with the same reactivity, end-to-end delay and memory requirement as a native OBS networ

Network level performance of differentiated services (diffserv) networks

The Differentiated Services (DiffServ) architecture is a promising means of providing Quality of Service (QoS) in Internet. In DiffServ networks, three service classes, or Per-hop Behaviors (PHBs), have been defined: Expedited Forwarding (EF), Assured Forwarding (AF) and Best Effort (BE). In this dissertation, the performance of DiffServ networks at the network level, such as end-to-end QoS, network stability, and fairness of bandwidth allocation over the entire network have been extensively investigated. It has been shown in literature that the end-to-end delay of EF traffic can go to infinity even in an over-provisioned network. In this dissertation, a simple scalable aggregate scheduling scheme, called Youngest Serve First (YSF) algorithm is proposed. YSF is not only able to guarantee finite end-to-end delay, but also to keep a low scheduling complexity. With respect to the Best Effort traffic, Random Exponential Marking (REM), an existing AQM scheme is studied under a new continuous time model, and its local stable condition is presented. Next, a novel virtual queue and rate based AQM scheme (VQR) is proposed, and its local stability condition has been presented. Then, a new AQM framework, Edge-based AQM (EAQM) is proposed. EAQM is easier to implement, and it achieves similar or better performance than traditional AQM schemes. With respect to the Assured Forwarding, a network-assist packet marking (NPM) scheme has been proposed. It has been demonstrated that NPM can fairly distribute bandwidth among AF aggregates based on their Committed Information Rates (CIRs) in both single and multiple bottleneck link networks

Joint path and resource selection for OBS grids with adaptive offset based QOS mechanism

Ankara : The Department of Electrical and Electronics Engineering and the Institute of Engineering and Sciences of Bilkent University, 2007.Thesis (Master's) -- Bilkent University, 2007.Includes bibliographical references leaves 71-76It is predicted that grid computing will be available for consumers performing their daily computational needs with the deployment of high bandwidth optical networks. Optical burst switching is a suitable switching technology for this kind of consumer grid networks because of its bandwidth granularity. However, high loss rates inherent in OBS has to be addressed to establish a reliable transmission infrastructure. In this thesis, we propose mechanisms to reduce loss rates in an OBS grid scenario by using network-aware resource selection and adaptive offset determination. We first propose a congestion-based joint resource and path selection algorithm. We show that path switching and network-aware resource selection can reduce burst loss probability and average completion time of grid jobs compared to the algorithms that are separately selecting paths and grid resources. In addition to joint resource and path selection, we present an adaptive offset algorithm for grid bursts which minimizes the average completion time. We show that the adaptive offset based QoS mechanism significantly reduces the job completion times by exploiting the trade-off between decreasing loss probability and increasing delay as a result of the extra offset time.Köseoğlu, MehmetM.S

Mécanismes de résolution et de prévention de la contention pour les réseaux optiques à commutation de rafales

L'explosion actuelle de l'utilisation des applications en temps réel, telles que la téléphonie et la vidéo haute définition, fait en sorte qu'une demande croissante en bande passante existe. Or, la fibre optique offre un très grand potentiel en termes de bande passante allant physiquement jusqu'à 50 terabits par seconde par fibre optique en utilisant un multiplexage en longueurs d'onde. La commutation de rafales en optique est une nouvelle technique de commutation permettant de tirer profit des avantages de la commutation de paquets et de la commutation de circuits. Une problématique majeure est le taux de perte élevé à cause du problème de la contention. Plusieurs techniques de résolution de la contention existent, notamment la déflexion et la retransmission. Dans la première partie de ce travail, on s'intéresse à combiner dynamiquement la déflexion et la retransmission d'une manière adaptative en tenant compte de l'état du réseau. L'algorithme proposé permet d'effectuer le plus de déflexions possibles tant que celles-ci ne déstabilisent pas le réseau. Les résultats démontrent également, avec des topologies fortement connectées telles que COST239, que l'algorithme proposé permet de diminuer radicalement les pertes en utilisant un ratio de déflexion très grand. La deuxième partie de ce travail porte sur la prévention de la contention en utilisant des tables de routage optimisées. Ces tables de routage sont optimisées en utilisant un modèle graphique probabiliste utilisé en intelligence artificielle, soit un réseau bayésien. ______________________________________________________________________________ MOTS-CLÉS DE L’AUTEUR : Fibre optique, WDM, Commutation de rafales, Contention, Déflexion, Retransmission

GMPLS-OBS interoperability and routing acalability in internet

The popularization of Internet has turned the telecom world upside down over the last two decades. Network operators, vendors and service providers are being challenged to adapt themselves to Internet requirements in a way to properly serve the huge number of demanding users (residential and business). The Internet (data-oriented network) is supported by an IP packet-switched architecture on top of a circuit-switched, optical-based architecture (voice-oriented network), which results in a complex and rather costly infrastructure to the transport of IP traffic (the dominant traffic nowadays). In such a way, a simple and IP-adapted network architecture is desired. From the transport network perspective, both Generalized Multi-Protocol Label Switching (GMPLS) and Optical Burst Switching (OBS) technologies are part of the set of solutions to progress towards an IP-over-WDM architecture, providing intelligence in the control and management of resources (i.e. GMPLS) as well as a good network resource access and usage (i.e. OBS). The GMPLS framework is the key enabler to orchestrate a unified optical network control and thus reduce network operational expenses (OPEX), while increasing operator's revenues. Simultaneously, the OBS technology is one of the well positioned switching technologies to realize the envisioned IP-over-WDM network architecture, leveraging on the statistical multiplexing of data plane resources to enable sub-wavelength in optical networks. Despite of the GMPLS principle of unified control, little effort has been put on extending it to incorporate the OBS technology and many open questions still remain. From the IP network perspective, the Internet is facing scalability issues as enormous quantities of service instances and devices must be managed. Nowadays, it is believed that the current Internet features and mechanisms cannot cope with the size and dynamics of the Future Internet. Compact Routing is one of the main breakthrough paradigms on the design of a routing system scalable with the Future Internet requirements. It intends to address the fundamental limits of current stretch-1 shortest-path routing in terms of RT scalability (aiming at sub-linear growth). Although "static" compact routing works fine, scaling logarithmically on the number of nodes even in scale-free graphs such as Internet, it does not handle dynamic graphs. Moreover, as multimedia content/services proliferate, the multicast is again under the spotlight as bandwidth efficiency and low RT sizes are desired. However, it makes the problem even worse as more routing entries should be maintained. In a nutshell, the main objective of this thesis in to contribute with fully detailed solutions dealing both with i) GMPLS-OBS control interoperability (Part I), fostering unified control over multiple switching domains and reduce redundancy in IP transport. The proposed solution overcomes every interoperability technology-specific issue as well as it offers (absolute) QoS guarantees overcoming OBS performance issues by making use of the GMPLS traffic-engineering (TE) features. Keys extensions to the GMPLS protocol standards are equally approached; and ii) new compact routing scheme for multicast scenarios, in order to overcome the Future Internet inter-domain routing system scalability problem (Part II). In such a way, the first known name-independent (i.e. topology unaware) compact multicast routing algorithm is proposed. On the other hand, the AnyTraffic Labeled concept is also introduced saving on forwarding entries by sharing a single forwarding entry to unicast and multicast traffic type. Exhaustive simulation campaigns are run in both cases in order to assess the reliability and feasible of the proposals

Telecommunications Networks

This book guides readers through the basics of rapidly emerging networks to more advanced concepts and future expectations of Telecommunications Networks. It identifies and examines the most pressing research issues in Telecommunications and it contains chapters written by leading researchers, academics and industry professionals. Telecommunications Networks - Current Status and Future Trends covers surveys of recent publications that investigate key areas of interest such as: IMS, eTOM, 3G/4G, optimization problems, modeling, simulation, quality of service, etc. This book, that is suitable for both PhD and master students, is organized into six sections: New Generation Networks, Quality of Services, Sensor Networks, Telecommunications, Traffic Engineering and Routing