239 research outputs found

    Design of Overlay Networks for Internet Multicast - Doctoral Dissertation, August 2002

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    Multicast is an efficient transmission scheme for supporting group communication in networks. Contrasted with unicast, where multiple point-to-point connections must be used to support communications among a group of users, multicast is more efficient because each data packet is replicated in the network – at the branching points leading to distinguished destinations, thus reducing the transmission load on the data sources and traffic load on the network links. To implement multicast, networks need to incorporate new routing and forwarding mechanisms in addition to the existing are not adequately supported in the current networks. The IP multicast are not adequately supported in the current networks. The IP multicast solution has serious scaling and deployment limitations, and cannot be easily extended to provide more enhanced data services. Furthermore, and perhaps most importantly, IP multicast has ignored the economic nature of the problem, lacking incentives for service providers to deploy the service in wide area networks. Overlay multicast holds promise for the realization of large scale Internet multicast services. An overlay network is a virtual topology constructed on top of the Internet infrastructure. The concept of overlay networks enables multicast to be deployed as a service network rather than a network primitive mechanism, allowing deployment over heterogeneous networks without the need of universal network support. This dissertation addresses the network design aspects of overlay networks to provide scalable multicast services in the Internet. The resources and the network cost in the context of overlay networks are different from that in conventional networks, presenting new challenges and new problems to solve. Our design goal are the maximization of network utility and improved service quality. As the overall network design problem is extremely complex, we divide the problem into three components: the efficient management of session traffic (multicast routing), the provisioning of overlay network resources (bandwidth dimensioning) and overlay topology optimization (service placement). The combined solution provides a comprehensive procedure for planning and managing an overlay multicast network. We also consider a complementary form of overlay multicast called application-level multicast (ALMI). ALMI allows end systems to directly create an overlay multicast session among themselves. This gives applications the flexibility to communicate without relying on service provides. The tradeoff is that users do not have direct control on the topology and data paths taken by the session flows and will typically get lower quality of service due to the best effort nature of the Internet environment. ALMI is therefore suitable for sessions of small size or sessions where all members are well connected to the network. Furthermore, the ALMI framework allows us to experiment with application specific components such as data reliability, in order to identify a useful set of communication semantic for enhanced data services

    Compact tree plus algorithms for application-level multicast communications in multihome networks

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    Application-level multicast (ALM) communications replicate packets on host level to deliver them from a single source to multiple clients, so that it can efficiently realize a variety of network applications using moving pictures such as video conferences, distance learning, and video-on-demands. In this paper, we propose the CT+ (compact tree plus) algorithm for finding a better ALM routing tree in terms of delay minimization between hosts. CT+ consists of a tree construction stage from the existing CT algorithm, and a newly added iterative tree improvement stage. Then, we define the extended ALM routing problem and its heuristic algorithm ExCT+, to optimize the effectiveness of the multihome network in ALM communications by selecting multihomed hosts and connections in the ALM routing tree simultaneously. For their evaluations, we construct a network simulation model named MINET (multiple-ISP network simulator), where the topology is composed of multiple ISP backbone networks with IX connections, and the network traffic is generated by following the M/M/1 queuing process. The simulation results using MINET verify the effectiveness of our algorithms.</p

    Deterministic Formulization of End-to-End Delay for Multicast Systems

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    End-System multicasting (ESM) is a promising application-layer scheme that has been recently proposed for implementing multicast routing in the application layer as a practical alternative to the IP multicasting. Moreover, ESM is an efficient application layer solution where all the multicast functionality is shifted to the end users. However, the limitation in bandwidth and the fact that the message needs to be forwarded from host-to-host using unicast connection, and consequently incrementing the end-to-end delay of the transmission process, contribute to the price to pay for this new approach. Therefore, supporting high-speed real-time applications such as live streaming multimedia, videoconferencing, distributed simulations, and multiparty games require a sound understanding of these multicasting schemes such as IP multicast and ESM and the factors that might affect the end-user requirements. In this paper, we present both the analytical and the mathematical models for formalizing the end-to-end delay efficiency of both IP and ESM multicast systems. For the sake of the experimental verifications of the proposed models, simulation results are presented in this paper. Finally, the proposed formulization can be used to design and implement a more robust and efficient multicast systems for the future networks

    Scalable service for flexible access to personal content

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    A decentralized framework for cross administrative domain data sharing

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    Federation of messaging and storage platforms located in remote datacenters is an essential functionality to share data among geographically distributed platforms. When systems are administered by the same owner data replication reduces data access latency bringing data closer to applications and enables fault tolerance to face disaster recovery of an entire location. When storage platforms are administered by different owners data replication across different administrative domains is essential for enterprise application data integration. Contents and services managed by different software platforms need to be integrated to provide richer contents and services. Clients may need to share subsets of data in order to enable collaborative analysis and service integration. Platforms usually include proprietary federation functionalities and specific APIs to let external software and platforms access their internal data. These different techniques may not be applicable to all environments and networks due to security and technological restrictions. Moreover the federation of dispersed nodes under a decentralized administration scheme is still a research issue. This thesis is a contribution along this research direction as it introduces and describes a framework, called \u201cWideGroups\u201d, directed towards the creation and the management of an automatic federation and integration of widely dispersed platform nodes. It is based on groups to exchange messages among distributed applications located in different remote datacenters. Groups are created and managed using client side programmatic configuration without touching servers. WideGroups enables the extension of the software platform services to nodes belonging to different administrative domains in a wide area network environment. It lets different nodes form ad-hoc overlay networks on-the-fly depending on message destinations located in distinct administrative domains. It supports multiple dynamic overlay networks based on message groups, dynamic discovery of nodes and automatic setup of overlay networks among nodes with no server-side configuration. I designed and implemented platform connectors to integrate the framework as the federation module of Message Oriented Middleware and Key Value Store platforms, which are among the most widespread paradigms supporting data sharing in distributed systems

    Applicability of group communication for increased scalability in MMOGs

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    Massive multiplayer online games (MMOGs) are today the driving factor for the development of distributed interactive applications, and they are increasing in size and complex-ity. Even a small MMOG supports thousands of players, the biggest support hundreds of thousands of concurrent players. Since they are typically built as strict client-server systems, they suffer from the inherent scalability problem of the architecture. Computing power and bandwidth limita-tions close to the server limit the possible number of players. Also, the latency of communication between players through the server will be higher than using direct communication. In the paper, we address these issues and investigate im-provement options. A typical MMOG consists of a virtual world with a con-cept of time and space that is similar to the real world. In it, players are represented by avatars. Only subsets of these avatars interact with each other at any given time. This allows us to divide them into groups, and communication among group members becomes a multi-party communica-tion problem. Thus, to reduce resource consumption, we compare the performance of several algorithms for group communication with the current central server approach. We use overlay multicast as the means of providing group communication, and research algorithms for creating short-est path trees, spanning trees, delay-bounded spanning trees and, more specific, applying Steiner tree heuristics. Our experimental results indicate that different approaches are useful to reduce resource consumption while achieving a good perceived quality under varying conditions, such as frequent changes in group membership and the demand for low latency. 1
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