Reducing Internet Latency : A Survey of Techniques and their Merit

Bob Briscoe, Anna Brunstrom, Andreas Petlund, David Hayes, David Ros, Ing-Jyh Tsang, Stein Gjessing, Gorry Fairhurst, Carsten Griwodz, Michael WelzlPeer reviewedPreprin

Enabling Multipath and Multicast Data Transmission in Legacy and Future Internet

The quickly growing community of Internet users is requesting multiple applications and services. At the same time the structure of the network is changing. From the performance point of view, there is a tight interplay between the application and the network design. The network must be constructed to provide an adequate performance of the target application. In this thesis we consider how to improve the quality of users' experience concentrating on two popular and resource-consuming applications: bulk data transfer and real-time video streaming. We share our view on the techniques which enable feasibility and deployability of the network functionality leading to unquestionable performance improvement for the corresponding applications. Modern mobile devices, equipped with several network interfaces, as well as multihomed residential Internet hosts are capable of maintaining multiple simultaneous attachments to the network. We propose to enable simultaneous multipath data transmission in order to increase throughput and speed up such bandwidth-demanding applications as, for example, file download. We design an extension for Host Identity Protocol (mHIP), and propose a multipath data scheduling solution on a wedge layer between IP and transport, which effectively distributes packets from a TCP connection over available paths. We support our protocol with a congestion control scheme and prove its ability to compete in a friendly manner against the legacy network protocols. Moreover, applying game-theoretic analytical modelling we investigate how the multihomed HIP multipath-enabled hosts coexist in the shared network. The number of real-time applications grows quickly. Efficient and reliable transport of multimedia content is a critical issue of today's IP network design. In this thesis we solve scalability issues of the multicast dissemination trees controlled by the hybrid error correction. We propose a scalable multicast architecture for potentially large overlay networks. Our techniques address suboptimality of the adaptive hybrid error correction (AHEC) scheme in the multicast scenarios. A hierarchical multi-stage multicast tree topology is constructed in order to improve the performance of AHEC and guarantee QoS for the multicast clients. We choose an evolutionary networking approach that has the potential to lower the required resources for multimedia applications by utilizing the error-correction domain separation paradigm in combination with selective insertion of the supplementary data from parallel networks, when the corresponding content is available. Clearly both multipath data transmission and multicast content dissemination are the future Internet trends. We study multiple problems related to the deployment of these methods.Internetin nopeasti kasvava käyttäjäkunta vaatii verkolta yhä enemmän sovelluksia ja palveluita. Samaan aikaan verkon rakenne muuttuu. Suorituskyvyn näkökulmasta on olemassa selvä vuorovaikutussovellusten ja verkon suunnittelun välillä. Verkko on rakennettava siten, että se pystyy takaamaan riittävän suorituskyvyn halutuille palveluille. Tässä väitöskirjassa pohditaan, miten verkon käyttökokemusta voidaan parantaa keskittyen kahteen suosittuun ja resursseja vaativaan sovellukseen: tiedonsiirtoon ja reaaliaikaiseen videon suoratoistoon. Esitämme näkemyksemme tekniikoista, jotka mahdollistavat tarvittavien verkkotoiminnallisuuksien helpon toteuttavuuden sekä kiistatta parantavat sovelluksien suorityskykyä. Nykyaikaiset mobiililaitteet monine verkkoyhteyksineen, kuten myös kotitietokoneet, pystyvät ylläpitämään monta internet-yhteyttä samanaikaisesti. Siksi ehdotamme monikanavaisen tiedonsiirron käyttöä suorituskyvyn parantamiseksi ja etenkin vaativien verkkosovelluksien, kuten tiedostonsiirron, nopeuttamiseksi. Tässä väitöskirjassa suunnitellaan Host Identity Protocol (mHIP) -laajennus, sekä esitetään tiedonsiirron vuorotteluratkaisu, joka hajauttaa TCP-yhteyden tiedonsiirtopaketit käytettävissä oleville kanaville. Protokollamme tueksi luomme myös ruuhkautumishallinta-algoritmin ja näytämme sen pystyvän toimimaan yhteen nykyisien verkkoprotokollien kanssa. Tämän lisäksi tutkimme peliteoreettista mallinnusta käyttäen, miten monikanavaiset HIP-verkkopäätteet toimivat muiden kanssa jaetuissa verkoissa. Reaaliaikaisten sovellusten määrä kasvaa nopeasti. Tehokas ja luotettava multimediasisällön siirto on olennainen vaatimus nykypäivän IP-verkoissa. Tässä työssä ratkaistaan monilähetyksen (multicast) jakelustruktuurin skaalautuvuuteen liittyviä ongelmia. Ehdotamme skaalautuvaa monilähetysarkkitehtuuria suurille peiteverkoille. Ratkaisumme puuttuu adaptiivisen virhekorjauksen (Adaptive Hybrid Error Correction, AHEC) alioptimaalisuuteen monilähetystilanteissa. Luomme hierarkisen monivaiheisen monilähetyspuutopologian parantaaksemme AHECin suorituskykyä, sekä taataksemme monilähetysasiakkaiden palvelun laadun. Valitsimme evoluutiomaisen lähestymistavan, jolla on potentiaalia keventää multimediasovelluksien verkkoresurssivaatimuksia erottamalla virhekorjauksen omaksi verkkotunnuksekseen, sekä käyttämällä valikoivaa täydentävää tiedonlisäystä rinnakkaisverkoista vastaavan sisällön ollessa saatavilla. Sekä monikanava- että monilähetystiedonsiirto ovat selvästi osa internetin kehityssuuntaa. Tässä väitöskirjassa tutkimme monia ongelmia näiden tekniikoiden käyttöönottoon liittyen

Design of interface selection protocols for multi-homed wireless networks

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and was awarded by Brunel University on 10 December 2010.The IEEE 802.11/802.16 standards conformant wireless communication stations have multi-homing transmission capability. To achieve greater communication efficiency, multi-homing capable stations use handover mechanism to select appropriate transmission channel according to variations in the channel quality. This thesis presents three internal-linked handover schemes, (1) Interface Selection Protocol (ISP), belonging to Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN)- Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access (WiMAX) environment (2) Fast Channel Scanning (FCS) and (3) Traffic Manager (TM), (2) and (3) belonging to WiMAX Environment. The proposed schemes in this thesis use a novel mechanism of providing a reliable communication route. This solution is based on a cross-layer communication framework, where the interface selection module uses various network related parameters from Medium Access Control (MAC) sub-layer/Physical Layer (PHY) across the protocol suite for decision making at the Network layer. The proposed solutions are highly responsive when compared with existing multi-homed schemes; responsiveness is one of the key factors in the design of such protocols. Selected route under these schemes is based on the most up to date link-layer information. Therefore, such a route is not only reliable in terms of route optimization but it also fulfils the application demands in terms of throughput and delay. Design of ISP protocol use probing frames during the route discovery process. The 802.11 mandates the use of different rates for data transmission frames. The ISP-metric can be incorporated into various routing aspects and its applicability is determined by the possibility of provision of MAC dependent parameters that are used to determine the best path metric values. In many cases, higher device density, interference and mobility cause variable medium access delays. It causes creation of ‘unreachable zones’, where destination is marked as unreachable. However, by use of the best path metric, the destination has been made reachable, anytime and anywhere, because of the intelligent use of the probing frames and interface selection algorithm implemented. The IEEE 802.16e introduces several MAC level queues for different access categories, maintaining service requirement within these queues; which imply that frames from a higher priority queue, i.e. video frames, are serviced more frequently than those belonging to lower priority queues. Such an enhancement at the MAC sub-layer introduces uneven queuing delays. Conventional routing protocols are unaware of such MAC specific constraints and as a result, these factors are not considered which result in channel performance degradation. To meet such challenges, the thesis presents FCS and TM schemes for WiMAX. For FCS, Its solution is to improve the mobile WiMAX handover and address the scanning latency. Since minimum scanning time is the most important issue in the handover process. This handover scheme aims to utilize the channel efficiently and apply such a procedure to reduce the time it takes to scan the neighboring access stations. TM uses MAC and physical layer (PHY) specific information in the interface metric and maintains a separate path to destination by applying an alternative interface operation. Simulation tests and comparisons with existing multi-homed protocols and handover schemes demonstrate the effectiveness of incorporating the medium dependent parameters. Moreover, show that suggested schemes, have shown better performance in terms of end-to-end delay and throughput, with efficiency up to 40% in specific test scenarios

Scalable and rate adaptive wireless multimedia multicast

The methods that are described in this work enable highly efficient audio-visual streaming over wireless digital communication systems to an arbitrary number of receivers. In the focus of this thesis is thus point-to-multipoint transmission at constrained end-to-end delay. A fundamental difference as compared to point-to-point connections between exactly two communicating sending and receiving stations is in conveying information about successful or unsuccessful packet reception at the receiver side. The information to be transmitted is available at the sender, whereas the information about successful reception is only available to the receiver. Therefore, feedback about reception from the receiver to the sender is necessary. This information may be used for simple packet repetition in case of error, or adaptation of the bit rate of transmission to the momentary bit rate capacity of the channel, or both. This work focuses on the single transmission (including retransmissions) of data from one source to multiple destinations at the same time. A comparison with multi-receiver sequentially redundant transmission systems (simulcast MIMO) is made. With respect to feedback, this work considers time division multiple access systems, in which a single channel is used for data transmission and feedback. Therefore, the amount of time that can be spent for transmitting feedback is limited. An increase in time used for feedback transmissions from potentially many receivers results in a decrease in residual time which is usable for data transmission. This has direct impact on data throughput and hence, the quality of service. In the literature, an approach to reduce feedback overhead which is based on simultaneous feedback exists. In the scope of this work, simultaneous feedback implies equal carrier frequency, bandwidth and signal shape, in this case orthogonal frequency-division multiplex signals, during the event of the herein termed feedback aggregation in time. For this scheme, a constant amount of time is spent for feedback, independent of the number of receivers giving feedback about reception. Therefore, also data throughput remains independent of the number of receivers. This property of audio-visual digital transmission is taken for granted for statically configured, single purpose systems, such as terrestrial television. In the scope of this work are, however, multi-user and multi-purpose digital communication networks. Wireless LANs are a well-known example and are covered in detail herein. In suchlike systems, it is of great importance to remain independent of the number of receivers, as otherwise the service of ubiquitous digital connectivity is at the risk of being degraded. In this regard, the thesis at hand elaborates at what bit rates audio-visual transmission to multiple receivers may take place in conjunction with feedback aggregation. It is shown that the scheme achieves a multi-user throughput gain when used in conjunction with adaptivity of the bit rate to the channel. An assumption is the use of an ideal overlay packet erasure correcting code in this case. Furthermore, for delay constrained transmission, such as in so-called live television, throughput bit rates are examined. Applications have to be tolerant to a certain level of residual error in case of delay constrained transmission. Improvement of the rate adaptation algorithm is shown to increase throughput while residual error rates are decreased. Finally, with a consumer hardware prototype for digital live-TV re-distribution in the local wireless network, most of the mechanisms as described herein can be demonstrated.Die in vorliegender Arbeit aufgezeigten Methoden der paketbasierten drahtlosen digitalen Kommunikation ermöglichen es, Fernsehinhalte, aber auch audio-visuelle Datenströme im Allgemeinen, bei hoher Effizienz an beliebig große Gruppen von Empfängern zu verteilen. Im Fokus dieser Arbeit steht damit die Punkt- zu Mehrpunktübertragung bei begrenzter Ende-zu-Ende Verzögerung. Ein grundlegender Unterschied zur Punkt-zu-Punkt Verbindung zwischen genau zwei miteinander kommunizierenden Sender- und Empfängerstationen liegt in der Übermittlung der Information über erfolgreichen oder nicht erfolgreichen Paketempfang auf Seite der Empfänger. Da die zu übertragende Information am Sender vorliegt, die Information über den Erfolg der Übertragung jedoch ausschließlich beim jeweiligen Empfänger, muss eine Erfolgsmeldung auf dem Rückweg von Empfänger zu Sender erfolgen. Diese Information wird dann zum Beispiel zur einfachen Paketwiederholung im nicht erfolgreichen Fall genutzt, oder aber um die Übertragungsrate an die Kapazität des Kanals anzupassen, oder beides. Grundsätzlich beschäftigt sich diese Arbeit mit der einmaligen, gleichzeitigen Übertragung von Information (einschließlich Wiederholungen) an mehrere Empfänger, wobei ein Vergleich zu an mehrere Empfänger sequentiell redundant übertragenden Systemen (Simulcast MIMO) angestellt wird. In dieser Arbeit ist die Betrachtung bezüglich eines Rückkanals auf Zeitduplexsysteme beschränkt. In diesen Systemen wird der Kanal für Hin- und Rückweg zeitlich orthogonalisiert. Damit steht für die Übermittlung der Erfolgsmeldung eine beschränkte Zeitdauer zur Verfügung. Je mehr an Kanalzugriffszeit für die Erfolgsmeldungen der potentiell vielen Empfänger verbraucht wird, desto geringer wird die Restzeit, in der dann entsprechend weniger audio-visuelle Nutzdaten übertragbar sind, was sich direkt auf die Dienstqualität auswirkt. Ein in der Literatur weniger ausführlich betrachteter Ansatz ist die gleichzeitige Übertragung von Rückmeldungen mehrerer Teilnehmer auf gleicher Frequenz und bei identischer Bandbreite, sowie unter Nutzung gleichartiger Signale (hier: orthogonale Frequenzmultiplexsignalformung). Das Schema wird in dieser Arbeit daher als zeitliche Aggregation von Rückmeldungen, engl. feedback aggregation, bezeichnet. Dabei wird, unabhängig von der Anzahl der Empfänger, eine konstante Zeitdauer für Rückmeldungen genutzt, womit auch der Datendurchsatz durch zusätzliche Empfänger nicht notwendigerweise sinkt. Diese Eigenschaft ist aus statisch konfigurierten und für einen einzigen Zweck konzipierten Systemen, wie z. B. der terrestrischen Fernsehübertragung, bekannt. In dieser Arbeit werden im Gegensatz dazu jedoch am Beispiel von WLAN Mehrzweck- und Mehrbenutzersysteme betrachtet. Es handelt sich in derartigen Systemen zur digitalen Datenübertragung dabei um einen entscheidenden Vorteil, unabhängig von der Empfängeranzahl zu bleiben, da es sonst unweigerlich zu Einschränkungen in der Güte der angebotenen Dienstleistung der allgegenwärtigen digitalen Vernetzung kommen muss. Vorliegende Arbeit zeigt in diesem Zusammenhang auf, welche Datenraten unter Benutzung von feedback aggregation in der Verteilung an mehrere Empfänger und in verschiedenen Szenarien zu erreichen sind. Hierbei zeigt sich, dass das Schema im Zusammenspiel mit einer Adaption der Datenrate an den Übertragungskanal inhärent einen Datenratengewinn durch Mehrbenutzerempfang zu erzielen vermag, wenn ein überlagerter idealer Paketauslöschungsschutz-Code angenommen wird. Des weiteren wird bei der Übertragung mit zeitlich begrenzter Ausführungsdauer, z. B. dem sogenannten Live-Fernsehen, aufgezeigt, wie sich die erreichbare Datenrate reduziert und welche Restfehlertoleranz an die Übertragung gestellt werden muss. Hierbei wird ebenso aufgezeigt, wie sich durch Verbesserung der Ratenadaption erstere erhöhen und zweitere verringern lässt. An einem auf handelsüblichen Computer-Systemen realisiertem Prototypen zur Live-Fernsehübertragung können die hierin beschriebenen Mechanismen zu großen Teilen gezeigt werden

Telecommunications Networks

This book guides readers through the basics of rapidly emerging networks to more advanced concepts and future expectations of Telecommunications Networks. It identifies and examines the most pressing research issues in Telecommunications and it contains chapters written by leading researchers, academics and industry professionals. Telecommunications Networks - Current Status and Future Trends covers surveys of recent publications that investigate key areas of interest such as: IMS, eTOM, 3G/4G, optimization problems, modeling, simulation, quality of service, etc. This book, that is suitable for both PhD and master students, is organized into six sections: New Generation Networks, Quality of Services, Sensor Networks, Telecommunications, Traffic Engineering and Routing

Exploiting the power of multiplicity: a holistic survey of network-layer multipath

The Internet is inherently a multipath network: For an underlying network with only a single path, connecting various nodes would have been debilitatingly fragile. Unfortunately, traditional Internet technologies have been designed around the restrictive assumption of a single working path between a source and a destination. The lack of native multipath support constrains network performance even as the underlying network is richly connected and has redundant multiple paths. Computer networks can exploit the power of multiplicity, through which a diverse collection of paths is resource pooled as a single resource, to unlock the inherent redundancy of the Internet. This opens up a new vista of opportunities, promising increased throughput (through concurrent usage of multiple paths) and increased reliability and fault tolerance (through the use of multiple paths in backup/redundant arrangements). There are many emerging trends in networking that signify that the Internet's future will be multipath, including the use of multipath technology in data center computing; the ready availability of multiple heterogeneous radio interfaces in wireless (such as Wi-Fi and cellular) in wireless devices; ubiquity of mobile devices that are multihomed with heterogeneous access networks; and the development and standardization of multipath transport protocols such as multipath TCP. The aim of this paper is to provide a comprehensive survey of the literature on network-layer multipath solutions. We will present a detailed investigation of two important design issues, namely, the control plane problem of how to compute and select the routes and the data plane problem of how to split the flow on the computed paths. The main contribution of this paper is a systematic articulation of the main design issues in network-layer multipath routing along with a broad-ranging survey of the vast literature on network-layer multipathing. We also highlight open issues and identify directions for future work

Improving packet delivery efficiency using multi-radio diversity in wireless LANs

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2006.Includes bibliographical references (p. 115-120).Data transmissions in Wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs) often suffer from bit errors that arise from the notoriously complex and time-varying signal propagation characteristics of the wireless medium. A number of physical factors such as attenuation and multi-path are prevalent indoors and can lead to high bit-error rates at the link layer. These in turn lead to packet losses, low throughput, and higher and more variable packet latencies observed at higher layers, degrading the performance of many delay-sensitive and traffic-intensive wireless applications such as games, file-sharing, voice-over-IP, and streaming video. We use the notion of path diversity to develop an approach that improves data delivery efficiency and throughput in presence of transmission errors. Path diversity relies on multiple access points (APs) covering a given area or multiple radios on the user's device (or both). The hypothesis underlying this system is as follows: because frame errors are often path-dependent (e.g., due to multi-path fading), location-dependent (e.g., due to noise), and statistically independent between different transmitting radios, transmissions are likely to succeed from at least one of the available transmitters (transmit diversity).(cont.) Likewise, multiple radios that all receive versions of the same transmission may together be able to correctly recover a frame, even when any given individual radio is not (receive diversity). Using these principles, we design and implement the Multi-Radio Diversity (MRD) system, which leverages the properties of path diversity at the transmitter and receiver to reduce frame loss rates in the link-layer, leading to increased throughput and packet delivery efficiency. We introduce several techniques that make path selection, retransmission, and rate adaptation work efficiently in a MRD system based on the 802.11 MAC. We used commodity PCs and wireless interfaces to build a MRD system and conducted a wide range of indoor experiments. Our experiments measured throughput gains up to three times over conventional schemes without consuming much extra wireless bandwidth.by Allen Ka Lun Miu.Ph.D