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

Concurrent Multipath Transfer: Scheduling, Modelling, and Congestion Window Management

Known as smartphones, multihomed devices like the iPhone and BlackBerry can simultaneously connect to Wi-Fi and 4G LTE networks. Unfortunately, due to the architectural constraints of standard transport layer protocols like the transmission control protocol (TCP), an Internet application (e.g., a file transfer) can use only one access network at a time. Due to recent developments, however, concurrent multipath transfer (CMT) using the stream control transmission protocol (SCTP) can enable multihomed devices to exploit additional network resources for transport layer communications. In this thesis we explore a variety of techniques aimed at CMT and multihomed devices, such as: packet scheduling, transport layer modelling, and resource management. Some of our accomplishments include, but are not limited to: enhanced performance of CMT under delay-based disparity, a tractable framework for modelling the throughput of CMT, a comparison of modelling techniques for SCTP, a new congestion window update policy for CMT, and efficient use of system resources through optimization. Since the demand for a better communications system is always on the horizon, it is our goal to further the research and inspire others to embrace CMT as a viable network architecture; in hopes that someday CMT will become a standard part of smartphone technology

Joint Routing and Congestion Control in Multipath Channel based on Signal to Noise Ratio with Cross Layer Scheme

Routing protocol and congestion control in Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) have important roles in wireless mobile network performance. In wireless communication, the stability of the path and successful data transmission will be influenced by the channel condition. This channel condition constraints come from path loss and the multipath channel fading. With these constraints, the algorithm in the routing protocol and congestion control is confronted with the uncertainty of connection quality and probability of successful packet transmission, respectively. It is important to investigate the reliability and robustness of routing protocol and congestion control algorithms in dealing with such situation.  In this paper, we develop a detailed approach and analytical throughput performance with a cross layer scheme (CLS) between routing and congestion control mechanism based on signal to noise ratio (SNR) in Rician and Rayleigh as multipath fading channel. We proposed joint routing and congestion control TCP with a cross layer scheme model based on SNR (RTCP-SNR). We compare the performance of RTCP-SNR with conventional routing-TCP and routing-TCP that used CLS with routing aware (RTCP-RA) model. The analyses and the simulation results showed that RTCP-SNR in a multipath channel outperforms conventional routing-TCP and RTCP-RA

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 Transport Latency for Short Flows with Multipath TCP

Multipath TCP (MPTCP) has been an emerging transport protocol that provides network resilience to failures and improves throughput by splitting a data stream into multiple subflows across all the available multiple paths. While MPTCP is generally beneficial for throughput-sensitive large flows with large number of subflows, it may be harmful for latency-sensitive small flows. MPTCP assigns each subflow a congestion window, making short flows susceptible to timeout when a flow only contains a few packets. This condition becomes even worse when the paths have heterogeneous characteristics as packet reordering occurs and the slow paths can be used with MPTCP, causing the increased end-to-end delay and the lower application Goodput. Thus, it is important to choose the appropriate subflows for each MPTCP connection to achieve the good performance. However, the subflows in MPTCP are determined before a connection is established, and they usually remain unchanged during the lifetime of that connection. To address this issue, we propose DMPTCP, which dynamically adjusts the subflows according to application workloads. Specifically, DMPTCP first utilizes the idea of TCP modeling to estimate the latency on the path under scheduling and the data amount sent on the other paths simultaneously, and then decides the set of subflows to be used for certain application periodically with the goal of reducing completion time for short flows and achieving a higher throughput for long flows. We implement DMPTCP in a Linux server and conduct extensive experiments both in NS3 and in Linux testbed to validate its effectiveness. Our evaluation shows that DMPTCP decreases the completion time by over 46.55% compared to conventional MPTCP for short flows while increases the Goodput up to 21.3% for long-lived flows

Reducing Transport Latency for Short Flows with Multipath TCP

Multipath TCP (MPTCP) has been an emerging transport protocol that provides network resilience to failures and improves throughput by splitting a data stream into multiple subflows across all the available multiple paths. While MPTCP is generally beneficial for throughput-sensitive large flows with large number of subflows, it may be harmful for latency-sensitive small flows. MPTCP assigns each subflow a congestion window, making short flows susceptible to timeout when a flow only contains a few packets. This condition becomes even worse when the paths have heterogeneous characteristics as packet reordering occurs and the slow paths can be used with MPTCP, causing the increased end-to-end delay and the lower application Goodput. Thus, it is important to choose the appropriate subflows for each MPTCP connection to achieve the good performance. However, the subflows in MPTCP are determined before a connection is established, and they usually remain unchanged during the lifetime of that connection. To address this issue, we propose DMPTCP, which dynamically adjusts the subflows according to application workloads. Specifically, DMPTCP first utilizes the idea of TCP modeling to estimate the latency on the path under scheduling and the data amount sent on the other paths simultaneously, and then decides the set of subflows to be used for certain application periodically with the goal of reducing completion time for short flows and achieving a higher throughput for long flows. We implement DMPTCP in a Linux server and conduct extensive experiments both in NS3 and in Linux testbed to validate its effectiveness. Our evaluation shows that DMPTCP decreases the completion time by over 46.55% compared to conventional MPTCP for short flows while increases the Goodput up to 21.3% for long-lived flows