Datacenter Traffic Control: Understanding Techniques and Trade-offs

Datacenters provide cost-effective and flexible access to scalable compute and storage resources necessary for today's cloud computing needs. A typical datacenter is made up of thousands of servers connected with a large network and usually managed by one operator. To provide quality access to the variety of applications and services hosted on datacenters and maximize performance, it deems necessary to use datacenter networks effectively and efficiently. Datacenter traffic is often a mix of several classes with different priorities and requirements. This includes user-generated interactive traffic, traffic with deadlines, and long-running traffic. To this end, custom transport protocols and traffic management techniques have been developed to improve datacenter network performance. In this tutorial paper, we review the general architecture of datacenter networks, various topologies proposed for them, their traffic properties, general traffic control challenges in datacenters and general traffic control objectives. The purpose of this paper is to bring out the important characteristics of traffic control in datacenters and not to survey all existing solutions (as it is virtually impossible due to massive body of existing research). We hope to provide readers with a wide range of options and factors while considering a variety of traffic control mechanisms. We discuss various characteristics of datacenter traffic control including management schemes, transmission control, traffic shaping, prioritization, load balancing, multipathing, and traffic scheduling. Next, we point to several open challenges as well as new and interesting networking paradigms. At the end of this paper, we briefly review inter-datacenter networks that connect geographically dispersed datacenters which have been receiving increasing attention recently and pose interesting and novel research problems.Comment: Accepted for Publication in IEEE Communications Surveys and Tutorial

A critical look at power law modelling of the Internet

This paper takes a critical look at the usefulness of power law models of the Internet. The twin focuses of the paper are Internet traffic and topology generation. The aim of the paper is twofold. Firstly it summarises the state of the art in power law modelling particularly giving attention to existing open research questions. Secondly it provides insight into the failings of such models and where progress needs to be made for power law research to feed through to actual improvements in network performance.Comment: To appear Computer Communication

DTMsim - DTM channel simulation in ns

Dynamic Transfer Mode (DTM) is a ring based MAN technology that provides a channel abstraction with a dynamically adjustable capacity. TCP is a reliable end to end transport protocol capable of adjusting its rate. The primary goal of this work is investigate the coupling of dynamically allocating bandwidth to TCP flows with the affect this has on the congestion control mechanism of TCP. In particular we wanted to find scenerios where this scheme does not work, where either all the link capacity is allocated to TCP or congestion collapse occurs and no capacity is allocated to TCP. We have created a simulation environment using ns-2 to investigate TCP over networks which have a variable capacity link. We begin with a single TCP Tahoe flow over a fixed bandwidth link and progressively add more complexity to understand the behaviour of dynamically adjusting link capacity to TCP and vice versa

Spacelab system analysis: A study of the Marshall Avionics System Testbed (MAST)

An analysis of the Marshall Avionics Systems Testbed (MAST) communications requirements is presented. The average offered load for typical nodes is estimated. Suitable local area networks are determined

Graph Theory and Networks in Biology

In this paper, we present a survey of the use of graph theoretical techniques in Biology. In particular, we discuss recent work on identifying and modelling the structure of bio-molecular networks, as well as the application of centrality measures to interaction networks and research on the hierarchical structure of such networks and network motifs. Work on the link between structural network properties and dynamics is also described, with emphasis on synchronization and disease propagation.Comment: 52 pages, 5 figures, Survey Pape

A new fault-tolerant configuration for the Cambridge Ring: the Hierarchical Ring-Star

The primary objective of this research is to look at ways of resolving the reliability problems of the Cambridge Ring local area network system. The result is a novel design to enhance the Cambridge Ring with fault tolerance by introducing redundant communication paths with dynamic reconfiguration. The proposed Ring-Star system combines the advantages of ring and star networks to create a network which is topologically resilient while retaining the efficient communication advantage of rings. [Continues.

VINEA: a policy-based virtual network embedding architecture

Network virtualization has enabled new business models by allowing infrastructure providers to lease or share their physical network. To concurrently run multiple customized virtual network services, such infrastructure providers need to run a virtual network embedding protocol. The virtual network embedding is the (NP-hard) problem of matching constrained virtual networks onto the physical network. We present the design and implementation of a policy-based architecture for the virtual network embedding problem. By policy, we mean a variant aspect of any of the (invariant) embedding mechanisms: resource discovery, virtual network mapping, and allocation on the physical infrastructure. Our architecture adapts to different scenarios by instantiating appropriate policies, and has bounds on embedding efficiency and on convergence embedding time, over a single provider, or across multiple federated providers. The performance of representative novel policy configurations are compared over a prototype implementation. We also present an object model as a foundation for a protocol specification, and we release a testbed to enable users to test their own embedding policies, and to run applications within their virtual networks. The testbed uses a Linux system architecture to reserve virtual node and link capacities.National Science Foundation (CNS-0963974

Teleoperation of passivity-based model reference robust control over the internet

This dissertation offers a survey of a known theoretical approach and novel experimental results in establishing a live communication medium through the internet to host a virtual communication environment for use in Passivity-Based Model Reference Robust Control systems with delays. The controller which is used as a carrier to support a robust communication between input-to-state stability is designed as a control strategy that passively compensates for position errors that arise during contact tasks and strives to achieve delay-independent stability for controlling of aircrafts or other mobile objects. Furthermore the controller is used for nonlinear systems, coordination of multiple agents, bilateral teleoperation, and collision avoidance thus maintaining a communication link with an upper bound of constant delay is crucial for robustness and stability of the overall system. For utilizing such framework an elucidation can be formulated by preparing site survey for analyzing not only the geographical distances separating the nodes in which the teleoperation will occur but also the communication parameters that define the virtual topography that the data will travel through. This survey will first define the feasibility of the overall operation since the teleoperation will be used to sustain a delay based controller over the internet thus obtaining a hypothetical upper bound for the delay via site survey is crucial not only for the communication system but also the delay is required for the design of the passivity-based model reference robust control. Following delay calculation and measurement via site survey, bandwidth tests for unidirectional and bidirectional communication is inspected to ensure that the speed is viable to maintain a real-time connection. Furthermore from obtaining the results it becomes crucial to measure the consistency of the delay throughout a sampled period to guarantee that the upper bound is not breached at any point within the communication to jeopardize the robustness of the controller. Following delay analysis a geographical and topological overview of the communication is also briefly examined via a trace-route to understand the underlying nodes and their contribution to the delay and round-trip consistency. To accommodate the communication channel for the controller the input and output data from both nodes need to be encapsulated within a transmission control protocol via a multithreaded design of a robust program within the C language. The program will construct a multithreaded client-server relationship in which the control data is transmitted. For added stability and higher level of security the channel is then encapsulated via an internet protocol security by utilizing a protocol suite for protecting the communication by authentication and encrypting each packet of the session using negotiation of cryptographic keys during each session

Hamiltonian Decompositions of Regular Topology Networks with Convergence Routing

This paper introduces new methods to construct multiple virtual rings for loss-free routing of non-reserved bursty data in high-speed environments such as ATM LANs. The routing algorithm on multiple virtual rings is convergence routing which combines the actual routing decision with the internal flow control state. Multiple virtual rings are obtained on the hypercube and the circulant networks such that each virtual ring is hamiltonian, and are mutually edge-disjoint. It is shown that multiple virtual rings improve (i) the bound on the length of routing, and (ii) the fault tolerance. On the circulant graphs, necessary and sufficient conditions for hamiltonian decomposition is established. On the hypercube, three algorithms are designed for an N-node hypercube with even dimension: (i) an O(N) time algorithm to find two edge-disjoint hamiltonian circuits, (ii) an O(N log N) time algorithm to find I01N hamiltonian circuits with only E ~ 0.1 common edges, and (iii) a recursive algorithm for the hamiltonian decomposition of the hypercube with dimension power of two. It is shown analytically, and verified by simulations on the circulants that with the d virtual ring embeddings, a bound of O( N / d) is established on the maximum length of routing