Congestion Control for Streaming Media

The Internet has assumed the role of the underlying communication network for applications such as file transfer, electronic mail, Web browsing and multimedia streaming. Multimedia streaming, in particular, is growing with the growth in power and connectivity of today\u27s computers. These Internet applications have a variety of network service requirements and traffic characteristics, which presents new challenges to the single best-effort service of today\u27s Internet. TCP, the de facto Internet transport protocol, has been successful in satisfying the needs of traditional Internet applications, but fails to satisfy the increasingly popular delay sensitive multimedia applications. Streaming applications often use UDP without a proper congestion avoidance mechanisms, threatening the well-being of the Internet. This dissertation presents an IP router traffic management mechanism, referred to as Crimson, that can be seamlessly deployed in the current Internet to protect well-behaving traffic from misbehaving traffic and support Quality of Service (QoS) requirements of delay sensitive multimedia applications as well as traditional Internet applications. In addition, as a means to enhance Internet support for multimedia streaming, this dissertation report presents design and evaluation of a TCP-Friendly and streaming-friendly transport protocol called the Multimedia Transport Protocol (MTP). Through a simulation study this report shows the Crimson network efficiently handles network congestion and minimizes queuing delay while providing affordable fairness protection from misbehaving flows over a wide range of traffic conditions. In addition, our results show that MTP offers streaming performance comparable to that provided by UDP, while doing so under a TCP-Friendly rate

FAST TCP: Motivation, Architecture, Algorithms, Performance

We describe FAST TCP, a new TCP congestion control algorithm for high-speed long-latency networks, from design to implementation. We highlight the approach taken by FAST TCP to address the four difficulties which the current TCP implementation has at large windows. We describe the architecture and summarize some of the algorithms implemented in our prototype. We characterize its equilibrium and stability properties. We evaluate it experimentally in terms of throughput, fairness, stability, and responsiveness

Implementation of Provably Stable MaxNet

MaxNet TCP is a congestion control protocol that uses explicit multi-bit signalling from routers to achieve desirable properties such as high throughput and low latency. In this paper we present an implementation of an extended version of MaxNet. Our contributions are threefold. First, we extend the original algorithm to give both provable stability and rate fairness. Second, we introduce the MaxStart algorithm which allows new MaxNet connections to reach their fair rates quickly. Third, we provide a Linux kernel implementation of the protocol. With no overhead but 24-bit price signals, our implementation scales from 32 bit/s to 1 peta-bit/s with a 0.001% rate accuracy. We confirm the theoretically predicted properties by performing a range of experiments at speeds up to 1 Gbit/sec and delays up to 180 ms on the WAN-in-Lab facility

Disturbance Rejection and Control in Web Servers

An important factor for a user of web sites on the Internet is the duration of time between the request of a web page until an answer has been returned. If this response time is too long, the user is likely to abandon the web site and search for other providers of the service. To avoid this loss of users, it is important for the web site operator to assure that users are treated sufficiently fast. On the other hand, it is also important to minimize the effort to optimize profit. As these objectives often are contradictory, an acceptable target response-time that can be formulated. The resources are allocated in a manner that ensures that long response times do not occur, while, at the same time, using as little resources as possible to not overprovision. The work presented in this doctoral thesis takes a control-theoretic perspective to solve this problem. The resources are considered as the control input, and the response time as the main output. Several disturbances affect the system, such as the arrival rate of requests to the web site. A testbed was designed to allow repeatable experiments with different controller implementations. A server was instrumented with sensors and actuators to handle requests from 12 client computers with capability for changing work loads. On the theoretical side, a model of a web server is presented in this thesis. It explicitly models a specific sensor implementation where buffering occurs in the computer prior to the sensor. As a result, the measurement of the arrival rate becomes state dependent under high load. This property turns out to have some undesirable effects on the controlled system. The model was capable of predicting the behavior of the testbed quite well. Based on the presented model, analysis shows that feed-forward controllers suggested in the literature can lead to instability under certain circumstances at high load. This has not been reported earlier, but is in this doctoral thesis demonstrated by both simulations and experiments. The analysis explains why and when the instability arises. In the attempt to predict future response-times this thesis also presents a feedback based prediction scheme. Comparisons between earlier predictions to the real response-times are used to correct a model based response time prediction. The prediction scheme is applied to a controller to compensate for disturbances before the effect propagates to the response time. The method improves the transient response in the case of sudden changes in the arrival rate of requests. This doctoral thesis also presents work on a control solution for reserving CPU capacity for a given process or a given group of processes on a computer system. The method uses only existing operating-system infrastructure, and achieves the desired CPU capacity in a soft real-time manner

Adaptive control of real-time media applications in best-effort networks

Quality of Service (QoS) in real-time media applications can be defined as the ability to guarantee the delivery of packets from source to destination over best-effort networks within some constraints. These constraints defined as the QoS metrics are end-to-end packet delay, delay jitter, throughtput, and packet losses. Transporting real-time media applications over best-effort networks, e.g. the Internet, is an area of current research. Both the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and the User Datagram Protocol (UDP) have failed to provide the desired QoS. This research aims at developing application-level end-to-end QoS controls to improve the user-perceived quality of real-time media applications over best-effort networks, such as, the public Internet. In this research an end-to-end packet based approach is developed. The end-to- end packet based approach consists of source buffer, network simulator ns-2, destina- tion buffer, and controller. Unconstrained model predictive control (MPC) methods are implemented by the controller at the application layer. The end-to-end packet based approach uses end-to-end network measurements and predictions as feedback signals. Effectiveness of the developed control methods are examined using Matlab and ns-2. The results demonstrate that sender-based control schemes utilizing UDP at transport layer are effective in providing QoS for real-time media applications transported over best-effort networks. Significant improvements in providing QoS are visible by the reduction of packet losses and the elimination of disruptions during the playback of real-time media. This is accompanied by either a decrease or increase in the playback start-time

An Optimal Medium Access Control with Partial Observations for Sensor Networks

We consider medium access control (MAC) in multihop sensor networks, where only partial information about the shared medium is available to the transmitter. We model our setting as a queuing problem in which the service rate of a queue is a function of a partially observed Markov chain representing the available bandwidth, and in which the arrivals are controlled based on the partial observations so as to keep the system in a desirable mildly unstable regime. The optimal controller for this problem satisfies a separation property: we first compute a probability measure on the state space of the chain, namely the information state, then use this measure as the new state on which the control decisions are based. We give a formal description of the system considered and of its dynamics, we formalize and solve an optimal control problem, and we show numerical simulations to illustrate with concrete examples properties of the optimal control law. We show how the ergodic behavior of our queuing model is characterized by an invariant measure over all possible information states, and we construct that measure. Our results can be specifically applied for designing efficient and stable algorithms for medium access control in multiple-accessed systems, in particular for sensor networks

Flow control techniques for real-time media applications in best-effort networks using fluid models

Quality of Service (QoS) in real-time media applications is an area of current interest because of the increasing demand for audio/video, and generally multimedia applications, over best effort networks, such as the Internet. Media applications are transported using the User Datagram Protocol (UDP) and tend to use a disproportionate amount of network bandwidth as they do not perform congestion or flow control. Methods for application QoS control are desirable to enable users to perceive a consistent media quality. This can be accomplished by either modifying current protocols at the transport layer or by implementing new control algorithms at the application layer irrespective of the protocol used at the transport layer. The objective of this research is to improve the QoS delivered to end-users in real-time applications transported over best-effort packet-switched networks. This is accomplished using UDP at the transport layer, along with adaptive predictive and reactive control at the application layer. An end-to-end fluid model is used, including the source buffer, the network and the destination buffer. Traditional control techniques, along with more advanced adaptive predictive control methods, are considered in order to provide the desirable QoS and make a best-effort network an attractive channel for interactive multimedia applications. The effectiveness of the control methods, is examined using a Simulink-based fluid-level simulator in combination with trace files extracted from the well-known network simulator ns-2. The results show that improvement in real-time applications transported over best-effort networks using unreliable transport protocols, such as UDP, is feasible. The improvement in QoS is reflected in the reduction of flow loss at the expense of flow dead-time increase or playback disruptions or both