Application-Oriented Flow Control: Fundamentals, Algorithms and Fairness

This paper is concerned with flow control and resource allocation problems in computer networks in which real-time applications may have hard quality of service (QoS) requirements. Recent optimal flow control approaches are unable to deal with these problems since QoS utility functions generally do not satisfy the strict concavity condition in real-time applications. For elastic traffic, we show that bandwidth allocations using the existing optimal flow control strategy can be quite unfair. If we consider different QoS requirements among network users, it may be undesirable to allocate bandwidth simply according to the traditional max-min fairness or proportional fairness. Instead, a network should have the ability to allocate bandwidth resources to various users, addressing their real utility requirements. For these reasons, this paper proposes a new distributed flow control algorithm for multiservice networks, where the application's utility is only assumed to be continuously increasing over the available bandwidth. In this, we show that the algorithm converges, and that at convergence, the utility achieved by each application is well balanced in a proportionally (or max-min) fair manner

Power allocation in wireless multi-user relay networks

In this paper, we consider an amplify-and-forward wireless relay system where multiple source nodes communicate with their corresponding destination nodes with the help of relay nodes. Conventionally, each relay equally distributes the available resources to its relayed sources. This approach is clearly sub-optimal since each user experiences dissimilar channel conditions, and thus, demands different amount of allocated resources to meet its quality-of-service (QoS) request. Therefore, this paper presents novel power allocation schemes to i) maximize the minimum signal-to-noise ratio among all users; ii) minimize the maximum transmit power over all sources; iii) maximize the network throughput. Moreover, due to limited power, it may be impossible to satisfy the QoS requirement for every user. Consequently, an admission control algorithm should first be carried out to maximize the number of users possibly served. Then, optimal power allocation is performed. Although the joint optimal admission control and power allocation problem is combinatorially hard, we develop an effective heuristic algorithm with significantly reduced complexity. Even though theoretically sub-optimal, it performs remarkably well. The proposed power allocation problems are formulated using geometric programming (GP), a well-studied class of nonlinear and nonconvex optimization. Since a GP problem is readily transformed into an equivalent convex optimization problem, optimal solution can be obtained efficiently. Numerical results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach

QUALITY OF SERVICE ARCHITECTURES APPLICABILITY IN AN INTRANET NETWORK

The quality of service (QoS) concept, which appeared initially as a necessity to improve Internet users perception, deals actually with new valences along with information society maturation. At the organisation’s level, the Intranet network shall assure in a similar manner as the Internet all kinds of services, which are useful to the organisation’s users. Starting from the traditional QoS architectural models, network administrators shall plan and design a QoS architecture, which will map on the organisation’s requirements, having at disposal not only own network elements but also communication services provided by other operators. The aim of this paper is to present, starting from the general QoS models, a comparative study of main advantages and drawbacks in implementing a specific Intranet QoS architecture taking into consideration all kind of aspects (material, financial, human resources), which impact on a good Intranet QoS management.QoS, IntServ, DiffServ, IntServ over DiffServ, VPN-MPLS, Intranet network