Buffer Sizing for 802.11 Based Networks

We consider the sizing of network buffers in 802.11 based networks. Wireless networks face a number of fundamental issues that do not arise in wired networks. We demonstrate that the use of fixed size buffers in 802.11 networks inevitably leads to either undesirable channel under-utilization or unnecessary high delays. We present two novel dynamic buffer sizing algorithms that achieve high throughput while maintaining low delay across a wide range of network conditions. Experimental measurements demonstrate the utility of the proposed algorithms in a production WLAN and a lab testbed.Comment: 14 pages, to appear on IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networkin

How happy are your flows: an empirical study of packet losses in router buffers

Studies of Internet traffic have revealed that traffic is consistent with self-similar scaling, shows long-range dependence, and that flow sizes are consistent with heavytailed distributions. However, how such characteristics affect fundamental network properties such as buffer overflows and therefore the loss process and link utilization has not been explored in detail. Relying on advanced instrumentation via NetFPGA cards, we perform a sensitivity study of the packet loss process within routers for different network load levels, flow size distributions, and buffer sizes. We find that packet losses do not affect all flows similarly. Depending on the network load and the buffer sizes, some flows either suffer from significantly more drops or significantly less drops than the average loss rate. Very few flows actually observe a loss rate similar to the average loss rate. Therefore, any single flow is very unlikely to observe the global packet loss process. Furthermore, the loss process can exhibit scaling properties

FavorQueue: A parameterless active queue management to improve TCP traffic performance

This paper presents and analyzes the implementation of a novel active queue management (AQM) named FavorQueue that aims to improve delay transfer of short lived TCP flows over best-effort networks. The idea is to dequeue packets that do not belong to a flow previously enqueued first. The rationale is to mitigate the delay induced by long-lived TCP flows over the pace of short TCP data requests and to prevent dropped packets at the beginning of a connection and during recovery period. Although the main target of this AQM is to accelerate short TCP traffic, we show that FavorQueue does not only improve the performance of short TCP traffic but also improves the performance of all TCP traffic in terms of drop ratio and latency whatever the flow size. In particular, we demonstrate that FavorQueue reduces the loss of a retransmitted packet, decreases the number of dropped packets recovered by RTO and improves the latency up to 30% compared to DropTail. Finally, we show that this scheme remains compliant with recent TCP updates such as the increase of the initial slow-start value

Analysis on Differential Router Buffer Size towards Network Congestion: A Simulation-based

Network resources are shared amongst a large number of users. Improper managing network traffic leads to congestion problem that degrades a network performance. It happens when the traffic exceeds the network capacity. In this research, we plan to observe the value of buffer size that contributes to network congestion. A simulation study by using OPNET Modeler 14.5 is conducted to achieve the purpose. A simple dumb-bell topology is used to observe several parameter such as number of packet dropped, retransmission count, end-to-end TCP delay, queuing delay and link utilization. The results show that the determination of buffer size based on Bandwidth-Delay Product (BDP) is still applicable for up to 500 users before network start to be congested. The symptom of near-congestion situation also being discussed corresponds to simulation results. Therefore, the buffer size needs to be determined to optimize the network performance based on our network topology. In future, the extension study will be carried out to investigate the effect of other buffer size models such as Stanford Model and Tiny Buffer Model. In addition, the buffer size has to be determined for wireless environment later on

A study on fairness and latency issues over high speed networks and data center networks

Newly emerging computer networks, such as high speed networks and data center networks, have characteristics of high bandwidth and high burstiness which make it difficult to address issues such as fairness, queuing latency and link utilization. In this study, we first conduct extensive experimental evaluation of the performance of 10Gbps high speed networks. We found inter-protocol unfairness and larger queuing latency are two outstanding issues in high speed networks and data center networks. There have been several proposals to address fairness and latency issues at switch level via queuing schemes. These queuing schemes have been fairly successful in addressing either fairness issue or large latency but not both at the same time. We propose a new queuing scheme called Approximated-Fair and Controlled-Delay (AFCD) queuing scheme that meets following goals for high speed networks: approximated fairness, controlled low queuing delay, high link utilization and simple implementation. The design of AFCD utilizes a novel synergistic approach by forming an alliance between approximated fair queuing and controlled delay queuing. AFCD maintains very small amount of state information in sending rate estimation of flows and makes drop decision based on a target delay of individual flow. We then present FaLL, a Fair and Low Latency queuing scheme that meets stringent performance requirements of data center networks: fair share of bandwidth, low queuing latency, high throughput, and ease of deployment. FaLL uses an efficiency module, a fairness module and a target delay based dropping scheme to meet these goals. Through rigorous experiments on real testbed, we show that FaLL outperforms various peer solutions in variety of network conditions over data center networks

Model based analysis of some high speed network issues

The study of complex problems in science and engineering today typically involves large scale data, huge number of large-scale scientific breakthroughs critically depends on large multi-disciplinary and geographically-dispersed research teams, where the high speed network becomes the integral part. To serve the ongoing bandwidth requirement and scalability of these networks, there has been a continuous evolution of different TCPs for high speed networks. Testing these protocols on a real network would be expensive, time consuming and more over not easily available to the researchers worldwide. Network simulation is well accepted and widely used method for performance evaluation, it is well known that packet-based simulators like NS2 and Opnet are not adequate in high speed also in large scale networks because of its inherent bottlenecks in terms of message overhead and execution time. In that case model based approach with the help of a set of coupled differential equations is preferred for simulations. This dissertation is focused on the key challenges on research and development of TCPs on high-speed network. To address these issues/challenges this thesis has three objectives: design an analytical simulation methodology; model behaviors of high speed networks and other components including TCP flows and queue using the analytical simulation method; analyze them and explore impacts and interrelationship among them. To decrease the simulation time and speed up the process of testing and development of high speed TCP, we present a scalable simulation methodology for high speed network. We present the fluid model equations for various high-speed TCP variants. With the help of these fluid model equations, the behavior of high-speed TCP variants under various scenarios and its effect on queue size variations are presented. High speed network is not feasible unless we understand effect of bottleneck buffer size on performance of these high-speed TCP variants. A fluid model is introduced to accommodate the new observations of synchronization and de-synchronization phenomena of packet losses at bottleneck link and a microscopic analysis is presented on different buffer sizes at drop-tail queuing scheme. The proposed model based methods promotes principal understanding of the future heterogeneous networks and accelerates protocol developments