High speed protocols for dual bus and dual ring network architectures

In this dissertation, two channel access mechanisms providing fair and bandwidth efficient transmission on dual bus and dual ring networks with high bandwidth-latency product are proposed. In addition, two effective priority mechanisms are introduced to meet the throughput and delay requirements of the diverse arrays of applications that future high speed networks must support. For dual bus architectures, the Buffer Insertion Bandwidth Balancing (BI_BWB) mechanism and the Preemptive priority Bandwidth Balancing (P_BI_BWB) mechanism are proposed. BI_BWB can significantly improve the delay performance of remote stations. It achieves that by providing each station with a shift register into which the station can temporarily store the upstream stations\u27 transmitted packets and replace these packets with its own transmissions. P_BI_BWB, an enhancement of BI_BWB, is designed to introduce effective preemptive priorities. This mechanism eliminates the effect of low priority on high priority by buffering the low priority traffic into a shift register until the transmission of the high priority traffic is complete. For dual ring architectures, the Fair Bandwidth Allocation Mechanism (FBAM) and the Effective Priority Bandwidth Balancing (EP_BWB) mechanism are introduced. FBAM allows stations to reserve channel bandwidth on a continuous basis rather than wait until bandwidth starvation is observed. Consequently, FBAM does not have to deal with the difficult issue of identifying starvation, a serious drawback of other access mechanisms such as the Local and Global Fairness Algorithms (LFA and GFA, respectively). In addition, its operation requires a significantly smaller number of control bits in the access control field of the slot and its performance is less sensitive to system parameters. Moreover, FBAM demonstrates Max-Min flow control properties with respect to the allocation of bandwidth among competing traffic streams, which is a significant advantage of FBAM over all the previously proposed channel access mechanisms. EP_BWB, an enhancement of FBAM to support preemptive priorities, minimizes the effect of low priority on high priority and supports delay-sensitive traffic by enabling higher priority classes to preempt the transmissions of lower priority classes. Finally, the great potential of EP_BWB to support the interconnection of base stations on a distributed control wireless PCN carrying voice and data traffic is demonstrated

Medium access control mechanisms for high speed metropolitan area networks

In this dissertation novel Medium Access Control mechanisms for High Speed Metropolitan Area networks are proposed and their performance is investigated under the presence of single and multiple priority classes of traffic. The proposed mechanisms are based on the Distributed Queue Dual Bus network, which has been adopted by the IEEE standardization committee as the 802.6 standard for Metropolitan Area Networks, and address most of its performance limitations. First, the Rotating Slot Generator scheme is introduced which uses the looped bus architecture that has been proposed for the 802.6 network. According to this scheme the responsibility for generating slots moves periodically from station to station around the loop. In this way, the positions of the stations relative to the slot generator change continuously, and therefore, there are no favorable locations on the busses. Then, two variations of a new bandwidth balancing mechanism, the NSW_BWB and ITU_NSW are introduced. Their main advantage is that their operation does not require the wastage of channel slots and for this reason they can converge very fast to the steady state, where the fair bandwidth allocation is achieved. Their performance and their ability to support multiple priority classes of traffic are thoroughly investigated. Analytic estimates for the stations\u27 throughputs and average segment delays are provided. Moreover, a novel, very effective priority mechanism is introduced which can guarantee almost immediate access for high priority traffic, regardless of the presence of lower priority traffic. Its performance is thoroughly investigated and its ability to support real time traffic, such as voice and video, is demonstrated. Finally, the performance under the presence of erasure nodes of the various mechanisms that have been proposed in this dissertation is examined and compared to the corresponding performance of the most prominent existing mechanisms

Extremely high data-rate, reliable network systems research

Significant progress was made over the year in the four focus areas of this research group: gigabit protocols, extensions of metropolitan protocols, parallel protocols, and distributed simulations. Two activities, a network management tool and the Carrier Sensed Multiple Access Collision Detection (CSMA/CD) protocol, have developed to the point that a patent is being applied for in the next year; a tool set for distributed simulation using the language SIMSCRIPT also has commercial potential and is to be further refined. The year's results for each of these areas are summarized and next year's activities are described

Robustness of bus overlays in optical networks

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2002.Includes bibliographical references (p. 53-56).This electronic version was submitted by the student author. The certified thesis is available in the Institute Archives and Special Collections.Local area networks (LANs) nowadays use optical fiber as the medium of communication. This fiber is used to connect a collection of electro-optic nodes which form network clouds. A network cloud is a distribution network that connects several external nodes to the backbone, and often takes the form of a star or tree. Optical stars and trees have expensive and inefficient recovery schemes, and as a result, are not attractive options when designing networks. In order to solve this problem, we introduce a virtual topology that makes use of the robustness that is inherently present in a metropolitan area network (MAN) or wide area network (WAN) (long haul network). The virtual topology uses a folded bus scheme and includes some of the elements of the real topology (architecture). By optically bypassing some of the router/switch nodes in the physical architecture, the virtual topology yields better recovery performance and more efficient systems (with respect to cost related to bandwidth and recoverability). We present a bus overlay which uses simple access nodes and is robust to single failures. Our architecture allows the use of existing optical backbone infrastructure. We consider a linear folded bus architecture and introduce a T-shaped folded bus. Although buses are generally not able to recover from failures, we propose a loopback approach. Our approach allows optical bypass of some routers during normal operation, thus reducing the load on routers, but makes use of routers in case of failures. We analyze the behavior of our linear and T-shaped systems under average use and failure conditions. We show that certain simple characteristics of the traffic matrix give meaningful performance characterization. We show that our architecture provides solutions which limit loads on the router.by Ari Levon Libarikian.S.M

Performance Improvements for FDDI and CSMA/CD Protocols

The High-Performance Computing Initiative from the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy has defined 20 major challenges in science and engineering which are dependent on the solutions to a number of high-performance computing problems. One of the major areas of focus of this initiative is the development of gigabit rate networks to be used in environments such as the space station or a National Research and Educational Network (NREN). The strategy here is to use existing network designs as building blocks for achieving higher rates, with the ultimate goal being a gigabit rate network. Two strategies which contribute to achieving this goal are examined in detail.1 FDDI2 is a token ring network based on fiber optics capable of a 100 Mbps rate. Both media access (MAC) and physical layer modifications are considered. A method is presented which allows one to determine maximum utilization based on the token-holding timer settings. Simulation results show that employing the second counter-rotating ring in combination with destination removal has a multiplicative effect greater than the effect which either of the factors have individually on performance. Two 100 Mbps rings can handle loads in the range of 400 to 500 Mbps for traffic with a uniform distribution and fixed packet size. Performance is dependent on the number of nodes, improving as the number increases. A wide range of environments are examined to illustrate robustness, and a method of implementation is discussed

A Topology-Aware Collision Resolution Algorithm

A new collision resolution algorithm called the Space Division Multiple Access protocol (SDMA) is presented. SDMA gains a performance advantage over similar protocols by using information about the positions of stations on the network. The protocol can operate asynchrononsly on a broadcast bus, allowing variable sized packet traffic. Through simulation the protocol is demonstrated to have better performance than Ethernet and the Capetanakis Tree protocol, a similar collision resolution protocol, under some traffic conditions. In particular, under heavy loads, SDMA displays better average throughput and lower variance of delay than Ethernet. The protocol demonstrates a performance bias based on the location of stations, but in most cases this bias is less sei\u3eere than that experienced by Ethernet

Future benefits and applications of intelligent on-board processing to VSAT services

The trends and roles of VSAT services in the year 2010 time frame are examined based on an overall network and service model for that period. An estimate of the VSAT traffic is then made and the service and general network requirements are identified. In order to accommodate these traffic needs, four satellite VSAT architectures based on the use of fixed or scanning multibeam antennas in conjunction with IF switching or onboard regeneration and baseband processing are suggested. The performance of each of these architectures is assessed and the key enabling technologies are identified

Protocols for collaborative applications on overlay networks.

Third, we address the limitations of traditional multicasting models. Towards this, we propose a model where a source node has different switching time for each child node and the message arrival time at each child depends on the order in which the source chooses to send the messages. This model captures the heterogeneous nature of communication links and node hardware on the overlay network. Given a multicast tree with link delays and generalized switching delay vectors at each non-leaf node, we provide an algorithm which schedules the message delivery at each non-leaf node in order to minimize the delay of the multicast tree.First, we consider the floor control problem wherein the participating users coordinate among themselves to gain exclusive access to the communication channel. To solve the floor control problem, we present an implementation and evaluation of distributed Medium Access Control (MAC) protocols on overlay networks. As an initial step in the implementation of these MAC protocols, we propose an algorithm to construct an efficient communication channel among the participating users in the overlay network. We also show that our implementation scheme (one of the first among decentralized floor control protocols) preserves the causal ordering of messages.Our research is focused on the development of algorithms for the construction of overlay networks that meet the demands of the distributed applications. In addition, we have provided network protocols that can be executed on these overlay networks for a chosen set of collaborative applications: floor control and multicasting. Our contribution in this research is four fold.Fourth, we address the problem of finding an arbitrary application designer specific overlay network on the Internet. This problem is equivalent to the problem of subgraph homeomorphism and it is NP-Complete. We have designed a polynomial-time algorithm to determine if a delay constrained multicasting tree (call it a guest) can be homeomorphically embedded in a general network (call it a host). A delay constrained multicasting tree is a tree wherein the link weights correspond to the maximum allowable delay between the end nodes of the link and in addition, the link of the guest should be mapped to a shortest path in the host. Such embeddings will allow distributed application to be executed in such a way that application specific quality-of-service demands can be met. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)Second, we address the problem of designing multicasting sub-network for collaborative applications using which messages are required to arrive at the destinations within a specified delay bound and all the destinations must receive the message from a source at 'approximately' the same time. The problem of finding a multicasting sub-network with delay and delay-variation bound has been proved to be NP-Complete in the literature and several heuristics have been proposed