5,325 research outputs found

    Energy-efficient wireless communication

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    In this chapter we present an energy-efficient highly adaptive network interface architecture and a novel data link layer protocol for wireless networks that provides Quality of Service (QoS) support for diverse traffic types. Due to the dynamic nature of wireless networks, adaptations in bandwidth scheduling and error control are necessary to achieve energy efficiency and an acceptable quality of service. In our approach we apply adaptability through all layers of the protocol stack, and provide feedback to the applications. In this way the applications can adapt the data streams, and the network protocols can adapt the communication parameters

    Congestion Control by Bandwidth-Delay Tradeoff in Very High-Speed Networks: The Case of Window-Based Control

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    Increasing bandwidth-delay product of high-speed wide-area networks is well-known to make conventional dynamic traffic control schemes sluggish . Still, most existing schemes employ dynamic control, among which TCP and ATM Forum\u27s rate-based flow control are prominent examples. So far, little has been investigated as to how the existing schemes will scale as bandwidth further increases up to gigabit speed and beyond. Our investigation in this paper is the first to show that dynamic control has a severe scalability problem with bandwidth increase, and to propose an entirely new approach to traffic control that overcomes the scalability problem. The essence of our approach is in exercising control in bandwidth domain rather than time domain, in order to avoid time delay in control. This requires more bandwidth than the timed counterpart, but achieves a much faster control. Furthermore, the bandwidth requirement is not excessively large because the bandwidth for smaller control delay and we call our approach Bandwidth-Latency Tradeoff (BLT). While the control in existing schemes are bound to delay, BLT is bound to bandwidth. As a fallout, BLT scales tied to bandwidth increase, rather than increasingly deteriorate as conventional schemes. Surprisingly, our approach begins to pay off much earlier than expected, even from a point where bandwidth-delay product is not so large. For instance, in a roughly AURORA-sized network, BLT far outperforms TCP on a shared 150Mbps link, where the bandwidth-delay product is around 60KB. In the other extreme where bandwidth-delay product is large, BLT outperforms TCP by as much as twenty times in terms of network power in a gigabit nationwide network. More importantly, BLT is designed to continue to scale with bandwidth increase and the performance gap is expected to widen further

    The Design of a System Architecture for Mobile Multimedia Computers

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    This chapter discusses the system architecture of a portable computer, called Mobile Digital Companion, which provides support for handling multimedia applications energy efficiently. Because battery life is limited and battery weight is an important factor for the size and the weight of the Mobile Digital Companion, energy management plays a crucial role in the architecture. As the Companion must remain usable in a variety of environments, it has to be flexible and adaptable to various operating conditions. The Mobile Digital Companion has an unconventional architecture that saves energy by using system decomposition at different levels of the architecture and exploits locality of reference with dedicated, optimised modules. The approach is based on dedicated functionality and the extensive use of energy reduction techniques at all levels of system design. The system has an architecture with a general-purpose processor accompanied by a set of heterogeneous autonomous programmable modules, each providing an energy efficient implementation of dedicated tasks. A reconfigurable internal communication network switch exploits locality of reference and eliminates wasteful data copies

    Explicit congestion control algorithms for available bit rate services in asynchronous transfer mode networks

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    Congestion control of available bit rate (ABR) services in asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) networks has been the recent focus of the ATM Forum. The focus of this dissertation is to study the impact of queueing disciplines on ABR service congestion control, and to develop an explicit rate control algorithm. Two queueing disciplines, namely, First-In-First-Out (FIFO) and per-VC (virtual connection) queueing, are examined. Performance in terms of fairness, throughput, cell loss rate, buffer size and network utilization are benchmarked via extensive simulations. Implementation complexity analysis and trade-offs associated with each queueing implementation are addressed. Contrary to the common belief, our investigation demonstrates that per-VC queueing, which is costlier and more complex, does not necessarily provide any significant improvement over simple FIFO queueing. A new ATM switch algorithm is proposed to complement the ABR congestion control standard. The algorithm is designed to work with the rate-based congestion control framework recently recommended by the ATM Forum for ABR services. The algorithm\u27s primary merits are fast convergence, high throughput, high link utilization, and small buffer requirements. Mathematical analysis is done to show that the algorithm converges to the max-min fair allocation rates in finite time, and the convergence time is proportional to the distinct number of fair allocations and the round-trip delays in the network. At the steady state, the algorithm operates without causing any oscillations in rates. The algorithm does not require any parameter tuning, and proves to be very robust in a large ATM network. The impact of ATM switching and ATM layer congestion control on the performance of TCP/IP traffic is studied and the results are presented. The study shows that ATM layer congestion control improves the performance of TCP/IP traffic over ATM, and implementing the proposed switch algorithm drastically reduces the required switch buffer requirements. In order to validate claims, many benchmark ATM networks are simulated, and the performance of the switch is evaluated in terms of fairness, link utilization, response time, and buffer size requirements. In terms of performance and complexity, the algorithm proposed here offers many advantages over other proposed algorithms in the literature

    Some aspects of traffic control and performance evaluation of ATM networks

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    The emerging high-speed Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) networks are expected to integrate through statistical multiplexing large numbers of traffic sources having a broad range of statistical characteristics and different Quality of Service (QOS) requirements. To achieve high utilisation of network resources while maintaining the QOS, efficient traffic management strategies have to be developed. This thesis considers the problem of traffic control for ATM networks. The thesis studies the application of neural networks to various ATM traffic control issues such as feedback congestion control, traffic characterization, bandwidth estimation, and Call Admission Control (CAC). A novel adaptive congestion control approach based on a neural network that uses reinforcement learning is developed. It is shown that the neural controller is very effective in providing general QOS control. A Finite Impulse Response (FIR) neural network is proposed to adaptively predict the traffic arrival process by learning the relationship between the past and future traffic variations. On the basis of this prediction, a feedback flow control scheme at input access nodes of the network is presented. Simulation results demonstrate significant performance improvement over conventional control mechanisms. In addition, an accurate yet computationally efficient approach to effective bandwidth estimation for multiplexed connections is investigated. In this method, a feed forward neural network is employed to model the nonlinear relationship between the effective bandwidth and the traffic situations and a QOS measure. Applications of this approach to admission control, bandwidth allocation and dynamic routing are also discussed. A detailed investigation has indicated that CAC schemes based on effective bandwidth approximation can be very conservative and prevent optimal use of network resources. A modified effective bandwidth CAC approach is therefore proposed to overcome the drawback of conventional methods. Considering statistical multiplexing between traffic sources, we directly calculate the effective bandwidth of the aggregate traffic which is modelled by a two-state Markov modulated Poisson process via matching four important statistics. We use the theory of large deviations to provide a unified description of effective bandwidths for various traffic sources and the associated ATM multiplexer queueing performance approximations, illustrating their strengths and limitations. In addition, a more accurate estimation method for ATM QOS parameters based on the Bahadur-Rao theorem is proposed, which is a refinement of the original effective bandwidth approximation and can lead to higher link utilisation

    Optimization flow control with Newton-like algorithm

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    We proposed earlier an optimization approach to reactive flow control where the objective of the control is to maximize the aggregate utility of all sources over their transmission rates. The control mechanism is derived as a gradient projection algorithm to solve the dual problem. In this paper we extend the algorithm to a scaled gradient projection. The diagonal scaling matrix approximates the diagonal terms of the Hessian and can be computed at individual links using the same information required by the unscaled algorithm. We prove the convergence of the scaled algorithm and present simulation results that illustrate its superiority to the unscaled algorithm

    Towards Autonomous Aviation Operations: What Can We Learn from Other Areas of Automation?

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    Rapid advances in automation has disrupted and transformed several industries in the past 25 years. Automation has evolved from regulation and control of simple systems like controlling the temperature in a room to the autonomous control of complex systems involving network of systems. The reason for automation varies from industry to industry depending on the complexity and benefits resulting from increased levels of automation. Automation may be needed to either reduce costs or deal with hazardous environment or make real-time decisions without the availability of humans. Space autonomy, Internet, robotic vehicles, intelligent systems, wireless networks and power systems provide successful examples of various levels of automation. NASA is conducting research in autonomy and developing plans to increase the levels of automation in aviation operations. This paper provides a brief review of levels of automation, previous efforts to increase levels of automation in aviation operations and current level of automation in the various tasks involved in aviation operations. It develops a methodology to assess the research and development in modeling, sensing and actuation needed to advance the level of automation and the benefits associated with higher levels of automation. Section II describes provides an overview of automation and previous attempts at automation in aviation. Section III provides the role of automation and lessons learned in Space Autonomy. Section IV describes the success of automation in Intelligent Transportation Systems. Section V provides a comparison between the development of automation in other areas and the needs of aviation. Section VI provides an approach to achieve increased automation in aviation operations based on the progress in other areas. The final paper will provide a detailed analysis of the benefits of increased automation for the Traffic Flow Management (TFM) function in aviation operations

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

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    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
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