Ethernet - a survey on its fields of application

During the last decades, Ethernet progressively became the most widely used local area networking (LAN) technology. Apart from LAN installations, Ethernet became also attractive for many other fields of application, ranging from industry to avionics, telecommunication, and multimedia. The expanded application of this technology is mainly due to its significant assets like reduced cost, backward-compatibility, flexibility, and expandability. However, this new trend raises some problems concerning the services of the protocol and the requirements for each application. Therefore, specific adaptations prove essential to integrate this communication technology in each field of application. Our primary objective is to show how Ethernet has been enhanced to comply with the specific requirements of several application fields, particularly in transport, embedded and multimedia contexts. The paper first describes the common Ethernet LAN technology and highlights its main features. It reviews the most important specific Ethernet versions with respect to each application field’s requirements. Finally, we compare these different fields of application and we particularly focus on the fundamental concepts and the quality of service capabilities of each proposal

Approaches for Future Internet architecture design and Quality of Experience (QoE) Control

Researching a Future Internet capable of overcoming the current Internet limitations is a strategic investment. In this respect, this paper presents some concepts that can contribute to provide some guidelines to overcome the above-mentioned limitations. In the authors' vision, a key Future Internet target is to allow applications to transparently, efficiently and flexibly exploit the available network resources with the aim to match the users' expectations. Such expectations could be expressed in terms of a properly defined Quality of Experience (QoE). In this respect, this paper provides some approaches for coping with the QoE provision problem

Time-bounded distributed QoS-aware service configuration in heterogeneous cooperative environments

The scarcity and diversity of resources among the devices of heterogeneous computing environments may affect their ability to perform services with specific Quality of Service constraints, particularly in dynamic distributed environments where the characteristics of the computational load cannot always be predicted in advance. Our work addresses this problem by allowing resource constrained devices to cooperate with more powerful neighbour nodes, opportunistically taking advantage of global distributed resources and processing power. Rather than assuming that the dynamic configuration of this cooperative service executes until it computes its optimal output, the paper proposes an anytime approach that has the ability to tradeoff deliberation time for the quality of the solution. Extensive simulations demonstrate that the proposed anytime algorithms are able to quickly find a good initial solution and effectively optimise the rate at which the quality of the current solution improves at each iteration, with an overhead that can be considered negligible

Statistical Delay Bound for WirelessHART Networks

In this paper we provide a performance analysis framework for wireless industrial networks by deriving a service curve and a bound on the delay violation probability. For this purpose we use the (min,x) stochastic network calculus as well as a recently presented recursive formula for an end-to-end delay bound of wireless heterogeneous networks. The derived results are mapped to WirelessHART networks used in process automation and were validated via simulations. In addition to WirelessHART, our results can be applied to any wireless network whose physical layer conforms the IEEE 802.15.4 standard, while its MAC protocol incorporates TDMA and channel hopping, like e.g. ISA100.11a or TSCH-based networks. The provided delay analysis is especially useful during the network design phase, offering further research potential towards optimal routing and power management in QoS-constrained wireless industrial networks.Comment: Accepted at PE-WASUN 201

Quality-of-service management in IP networks

Quality of Service (QoS) in Internet Protocol (IF) Networks has been the subject of active research over the past two decades. Integrated Services (IntServ) and Differentiated Services (DiffServ) QoS architectures have emerged as proposed standards for resource allocation in IF Networks. These two QoS architectures support the need for multiple traffic queuing systems to allow for resource partitioning for heterogeneous applications making use of the networks. There have been a number of specifications or proposals for the number of traffic queuing classes (Class of Service (CoS)) that will support integrated services in IF Networks, but none has provided verification in the form of analytical or empirical investigation to prove that its specification or proposal will be optimum. Despite the existence of the two standard QoS architectures and the large volume of research work that has been carried out on IF QoS, its deployment still remains elusive in the Internet. This is not unconnected with the complexities associated with some aspects of the standard QoS architectures. [Continues.

A QoS-enabled resource management scheme for F-HMIPv6 micro mobility approach

In the near future, wireless networks will certainly run real-time applications with special Quality of Service (QoS) requirements. In this context micro mobility management schemes such as Fast Handovers over Hierarchical Mobile IPv6 (F-HMIPv6) will be a useful tool in reducing Mobile IPv6 (MIPv6) handover disruption and thereby to improve delay and losses. However, F-HMIPv6 alone does not support QoS requirements for real-time applications. Therefore, in order to accomplish this goal, a novel resource management scheme for the Differentiated Services (DiffServ) QoS model is proposed to be used as an add-on to F-HMIPv6. The new resource management scheme combines the F-HMIPv6 functionalities with the DiffServ QoS model and with network congestion control and dynamic reallocation mechanisms in order to accommodate different QoS traffic requirements. This new scheme based on a Measurement-Based Admission Control (MBAC) algorithm is effective, simple, scalable and avoids the well known traditional resource reservation issues such as state maintenance, signaling overhead and processing load. By means of the admission evaluation of new flows and handover flows, it is able to provide the desired QoS requirements for new flows while preserving the QoS of existing ones. The evaluated results show that all QoS metrics analyzed were significantly improved with the new architecture indicating that it is able to provide a highly predictive QoS support to F-HMIPv6

Resource Management in Multimedia Networked Systems

Error-free multimedia data processing and communication includes providing guaranteed services such as the colloquial telephone. A set of problems have to be solved and handled in the control-management level of the host and underlying network architectures. We discuss in this paper \u27resource management\u27 at the host and network level, and their cooperation to achieve global guaranteed transmission and presentation services, which means end-to-end guarantees. The emphasize is on \u27network resources\u27 (e.g., bandwidth, buffer space) and \u27host resources\u27 (e.g., CPU processing time) which need to be controlled in order to satisfy the Quality of Service (QoS) requirements set by the users of the multimedia networked system. The control of the specified resources involves three actions: (1) properly allocate resources (end-to-end) during the multimedia call establishment, so that traffic can flow according to the QoS specification; (2) control resource allocation during the multimedia transmission; (3) adapt to changes when degradation of system components occurs. These actions imply the necessity of: (a) new services, such as admission services, at the hosts and intermediate network nodes; (b) new protocols for establishing connections which satisfy QoS requirements along the path from send to receiver(s), such as resource reservation protocol; (c) new control algorithms for delay, rate and error control; (d) new resource monitoring protocols for reporting system changes, such as resource administration protocol; (e) new adaptive schemes for dynamic resource allocation to respond to system changes; and (f) new architectures at the hosts and switches to accommodate the resource management entities. This article gives an overview of services, mechanisms and protocols for resource management as outlined above