23,510 research outputs found
Fixed-Mobile Convergence in the 5G era: From Hybrid Access to Converged Core
The availability of different paths to communicate to a user or device
introduces several benefits, from boosting enduser performance to improving
network utilization. Hybrid access is a first step in enabling convergence of
mobile and fixed networks, however, despite traffic optimization, this approach
is limited as fixed and mobile are still two separate core networks
inter-connected through an aggregation point. On the road to 5G networks, the
design trend is moving towards an aggregated network, where different access
technologies share a common anchor point in the core. This enables further
network optimization in addition to hybrid access, examples are userspecific
policies for aggregation and improved traffic balancing across different
accesses according to user, network, and service context. This paper aims to
discuss the ongoing work around hybrid access and network convergence by
Broadband Forum and 3GPP. We present some testbed results on hybrid access and
analyze some primary performance indicators such as achievable data rates, link
utilization for aggregated traffic and session setup latency. We finally
discuss the future directions for network convergence to enable future
scenarios with enhanced configuration capabilities for fixed and mobile
convergence.Comment: to appear in IEEE Networ
A Survey on the Contributions of Software-Defined Networking to Traffic Engineering
Since the appearance of OpenFlow back in 2008, software-defined networking (SDN) has gained momentum. Although there are some discrepancies between the standards developing organizations working with SDN about what SDN is and how it is defined, they all outline traffic engineering (TE) as a key application. One of the most common objectives of TE is the congestion minimization, where techniques such as traffic splitting among multiple paths or advanced reservation systems are used. In such a scenario, this manuscript surveys the role of a comprehensive list of SDN protocols in TE solutions, in order to assess how these protocols can benefit TE. The SDN protocols have been categorized using the SDN architecture proposed by the open networking foundation, which differentiates among data-controller plane interfaces, application-controller plane interfaces, and management interfaces, in order to state how the interface type in which they operate influences TE. In addition, the impact of the SDN protocols on TE has been evaluated by comparing them with the path computation element (PCE)-based architecture. The PCE-based architecture has been selected to measure the impact of SDN on TE because it is the most novel TE architecture until the date, and because it already defines a set of metrics to measure the performance of TE solutions. We conclude that using the three types of interfaces simultaneously will result in more powerful and enhanced TE solutions, since they benefit TE in complementary ways.European Commission through the Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme (GN4) under Grant 691567
Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness under the Secure Deployment of Services Over SDN and NFV-based Networks Project S&NSEC under Grant TEC2013-47960-C4-3-
Reducing Congestion Effects by Multipath Routing in Wireless Networks
We propose a solution to improve fairness and increasethroughput in wireless networks with location information.Our approach consists of a multipath routing protocol, BiasedGeographical Routing (BGR), and two congestion controlalgorithms, In-Network Packet Scatter (IPS) and End-to-EndPacket Scatter (EPS), which leverage BGR to avoid the congestedareas of the network. BGR achieves good performancewhile incurring a communication overhead of just 1 byte perdata packet, and has a computational complexity similar togreedy geographic routing. IPS alleviates transient congestion bysplitting traffic immediately before the congested areas. In contrast,EPS alleviates long term congestion by splitting the flow atthe source, and performing rate control. EPS selects the pathsdynamically, and uses a less aggressive congestion controlmechanism on non-greedy paths to improve energy efficiency.Simulation and experimental results show that our solutionachieves its objectives. Extensive ns-2 simulations show that oursolution improves both fairness and throughput as compared tosingle path greedy routing. Our solution reduces the variance ofthroughput across all flows by 35%, reduction which is mainlyachieved by increasing throughput of long-range flows witharound 70%. Furthermore, overall network throughput increasesby approximately 10%. Experimental results on a 50-node testbed are consistent with our simulation results, suggestingthat BGR is effective in practice
Energy management in communication networks: a journey through modelling and optimization glasses
The widespread proliferation of Internet and wireless applications has
produced a significant increase of ICT energy footprint. As a response, in the
last five years, significant efforts have been undertaken to include
energy-awareness into network management. Several green networking frameworks
have been proposed by carefully managing the network routing and the power
state of network devices.
Even though approaches proposed differ based on network technologies and
sleep modes of nodes and interfaces, they all aim at tailoring the active
network resources to the varying traffic needs in order to minimize energy
consumption. From a modeling point of view, this has several commonalities with
classical network design and routing problems, even if with different
objectives and in a dynamic context.
With most researchers focused on addressing the complex and crucial
technological aspects of green networking schemes, there has been so far little
attention on understanding the modeling similarities and differences of
proposed solutions. This paper fills the gap surveying the literature with
optimization modeling glasses, following a tutorial approach that guides
through the different components of the models with a unified symbolism. A
detailed classification of the previous work based on the modeling issues
included is also proposed
TCP throughput guarantee in the DiffServ Assured Forwarding service: what about the results?
Since the proposition of Quality of Service architectures by the IETF, the
interaction between TCP and the QoS services has been intensively studied. This
paper proposes to look forward to the results obtained in terms of TCP
throughput guarantee in the DiffServ Assured Forwarding (DiffServ/AF) service
and to present an overview of the different proposals to solve the problem. It
has been demonstrated that the standardized IETF DiffServ conditioners such as
the token bucket color marker and the time sliding window color maker were not
good TCP traffic descriptors. Starting with this point, several propositions
have been made and most of them presents new marking schemes in order to
replace or improve the traditional token bucket color marker. The main problem
is that TCP congestion control is not designed to work with the AF service.
Indeed, both mechanisms are antagonists. TCP has the property to share in a
fair manner the bottleneck bandwidth between flows while DiffServ network
provides a level of service controllable and predictable. In this paper, we
build a classification of all the propositions made during these last years and
compare them. As a result, we will see that these conditioning schemes can be
separated in three sets of action level and that the conditioning at the
network edge level is the most accepted one. We conclude that the problem is
still unsolved and that TCP, conditioned or not conditioned, remains
inappropriate to the DiffServ/AF service
A splitting rate model of traffic re-routeing and traffic control
Non peer reviewedPublisher PD
Multipath streaming: fundamental limits and efficient algorithms
We investigate streaming over multiple links. A file is split into small
units called chunks that may be requested on the various links according to
some policy, and received after some random delay. After a start-up time called
pre-buffering time, received chunks are played at a fixed speed. There is
starvation if the chunk to be played has not yet arrived. We provide lower
bounds (fundamental limits) on the starvation probability of any policy. We
further propose simple, order-optimal policies that require no feedback. For
general delay distributions, we provide tractable upper bounds for the
starvation probability of the proposed policies, allowing to select the
pre-buffering time appropriately. We specialize our results to: (i) links that
employ CSMA or opportunistic scheduling at the packet level, (ii) links shared
with a primary user (iii) links that use fair rate sharing at the flow level.
We consider a generic model so that our results give insight into the design
and performance of media streaming over (a) wired networks with several paths
between the source and destination, (b) wireless networks featuring spectrum
aggregation and (c) multi-homed wireless networks.Comment: 24 page
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