A multi-objective particle swarm optimized fuzzy logic congestion detection and dual explicit notification mechanism for IP networks.

Thesis (M.Sc.Eng.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, 2006.The Internet has experienced a tremendous growth over the past two decades and with that growth have come severe congestion problems. Research efforts to alleviate the congestion problem can broadly be classified into three groups: Cl) Router based congestion detection; (2) Generation and transmission of congestion notification signal to the traffic sources; (3) End-to-end algorithms which control the flow of traffic between the end hosts. This dissertation has largely addressed the first two groups which are basically router initiated. Router based congestion detection mechanisms, commonly known as Active Queue Management (AQM), can be classified into two groups: conventional mathematical analytical techniques and fuzzy logic based techniques. Research has shown that fuzzy logic techniques are more effective and robust compared to the conventional techniques because they do not rely on the availability of a precise mathematical model of Internet. They use linguistic knowledge and are, therefore, better placed to handle the complexities associated with the non-linearity and dynamics of the Internet. In spite of all these developments, there still exists ample room for improvement because, practically, there has been a slow deployment of AQM mechanisms. In the first part of this dissertation, we study the major AQM schemes in both the conventional and the fuzzy logic domain in order to uncover the problems that have hampered their deployment in practical implementations. Based on the findings from this study, we model the Internet congestion problem as a multi-objective problem. We propose a Fuzzy Logic Congestion Detection (FLCD) which synergistically combines the good characteristics of the fuzzy approaches with those of the conventional approaches. We design the membership functions (MFs) of the FLCD algorithm automatically by using Multi-objective Particle Swarm Optimization (MOPSO), a population based stochastic optimization algorithm. This enables the FLCD algorithm to achieve optimal performance on all the major objectives of Internet congestion control. The FLCD algorithm is compared with the basic Fuzzy Logic AQM and the Random Explicit Marking (REM) algorithms on a best effort network. Simulation results show that the FLCD algorithm provides high link utilization whilst maintaining lower jitter and packet loss. It also exhibits higher fairness and stability compared to its basic variant and REM. We extend this concept to Proportional Differentiated Services network environment where the FLCD algorithm outperforms the traditional Weighted RED algorithm. We also propose self learning and organization structures which enable the FLCD algorithm to achieve a more stable queue, lower packet losses and UDP traffic delay in dynamic traffic environments on both wired and wireless networks. In the second part of this dissertation, we present the congestion notification mechanisms which have been proposed for wired and satellite networks. We propose an FLCD based dual explicit congestion notification algorithm which combines the merits of the Explicit Congestion Notification (ECN) and the Backward Explicit Congestion Notification (BECN) mechanisms. In this proposal, the ECN mechanism is invoked based on the packet marking probability while the BECN mechanism is invoked based on the BECN parameter which helps to ensure that BECN is invoked only when congestion is severe. Motivated by the fact that TCP reacts to tbe congestion notification signal only once during a round trip time (RTT), we propose an RTT based BECN decay function. This reduces the invocation of the BECN mechanism and resultantly the generation of reverse traffic during an RTT. Compared to the traditional explicit notification mechanisms, simulation results show that the new approach exhibits lower packet loss rates and higher queue stability on wired networks. It also exhibits lower packet loss rates, higher good-put and link utilization on satellite networks. We also observe that the BECN decay function reduces reverse traffic significantly on both wired and satellite networks while ensuring that performance remains virtually the same as in the algorithm without BECN traffic reduction.Print copy complete; page numbering of 105-108 incorrect

Router-based network traffic observation by terminal sliding mode control theory

Since the early days of the Internet, network traffic monitoring (NTM) has always played a strategic role in understanding and characterizing users’ activities. Nowadays, with the increased complexity of the Internet infrastructure, applications, and services, this role has become more crucial than ever. The aims of NTM are mainly focused on the three improvements, which include the quality of service (QoS) of the network, optimization of resource usage, and enhancement of security in computer networks. Specifically speaking, firstly, network conditions can be recognized by the network manager with NTM scheme. It provides the complete details about the QoS of networks, such as bandwidth, throughput, propagation delay, link availability, jitter, server memory, database space and etc. Secondly, with NTM being implemented at network nodes, i.e., network gateways, such as routers, or network links, the network traffic that is traversing the network is under online observation. Thereby, the network utilization can be improved by optimizing the resource usage to avoid the network congestions. Thirdly, unauthenticated service or approaches to the server will be identified by regularly monitoring the traffic. The network convention and statistics about the traffic will be known easily which helps to troubleshoot the network. Security events will also be investigated and the entry of the user will be maintained for responsibility. The work in this thesis focuses on the development of an intelligent real-time dynamic router-based network traffic observation (RNTO) by using the terminal sliding-mode theory. The RNTO technique is applied at network gateways, i.e., routers, to estimate the status of the traffic flows at the router level. The aims of the proposed RNTO technique is to estimate the traffic states, such as queue length (QL)in router buffer, average congestion window size (ACwnd), and the queuing dynamics of the additional traffic flows (ATF). The main contributions of the work can be broadly categorized into four parts. First, the problem of router-based network traffic monitoring is formulated as an observer design by using TSM theory for RNTO applications. The proposed TSM observer in the research is a network-based monitoring, which is implemented into the network gateways, i.e., network routers. Different from the static network traffic monitoring methods, the TSM observer is designed by using control methods based on the fluid-flow mathematical model, which represents the traffic dynamics of the interactions in a set of TCP traffic flows through network routers. By considering the time delay and stochastic properties in the data transmission network, the sliding-mode observation strategy is proposed with its high robustness with system parameter uncertainties as well as the external disturbance rejection. Given the natural weakness of chattering in sliding mode control signal, which can affect the system state, the chattering avoiding technique of the proposed TSM observation was utilized by using a smooth control signal for estimating the abnormal dynamics. It does not need any low-pass filler, which will lead to a phase leg. In addition, for the stochastic dynamics of the network traffics, fast transient convergence at a distance from and within a close range of the equilibrium of the traffic dynamics is essential to quickly capture traffic dynamics in network systems. Thus, a fractional term has been considered in the TSM for faster convergence in system states to efficiently estimate the traffic behaviors. Second, the issue of internal dynamics in network observation system is studied by proposing a novel full-order TSM strategy to speed up the convergence rate of the estimation error. In the RNTO scheme, the precise estimation for ACwnd is needed to estimate the queuing dynamics of ATF. However, the estimation error for ACwnd is not available and it converges to origin asymptotically, which results in a long response time in estimation. The proposed novel TSM observer has been designed to drive the estimation error for ACwnd to a defined known area in the finite-time, which can be calculated. Thereby, the estimation error of ACwnd can converge to origin asymptotically within the defined area. This strategy has shortened the response time and improves the estimation accuracy. This further improves the estimation accuracy for ATF. The comparative studies are conducted to evaluate the performance. Third, the issue of algorithm-efficient RNTO is investigated by considering an event triggered sliding-mode observer to reduce the computational load and the communication burden. Instead of the time-driven observation scheme, the control of the sliding mode observer is formulated under the event triggered scheme. The control of the observer is designed to be smooth and is directly applied to estimate the dynamics of the additional traffic flows. The event triggered observation algorithms is developed to reduce the computational load of the network router and the communication resource of output link in the network. Fourth, the problem of global RNTO is addressed by developing a fuzzy TSM observer by using fuzzy theory to achieve global operation under network uncertainties. The existing RNTO schemes are based on the linearization of a certain network conditions, i.e., a fixed number of TCP connections, which is a constant value N. Given the network suffers from time-varying fading, shadowing and interference and the data rate changes over time, the current methods proposed so far might not effectively and accurately monitor and estimate the traffic dynamics under network uncertainties. The T-S fuzzy models are used to model the traffic dynamics of the time-varying data changes in network link resources, i.e. the time-varying number of TCP sections, N(t) in a mathematical model. Based on the T-S fuzzy models, the fuzzy terminal sliding mode observer is established by using the fuzzy logic theory to estimate the states of the network traffic to achieve the global observation performance under the network uncertainties. In the fuzzy terminal sliding mode observer, the control signal is designed to be continuous for application of estimating the additional traffic flows without the low-pass filter. To evaluate the proposed RNTO technique, the networking simulator tool Network Simulator II (NS-II) has been used. The proposed RNTO algorithms are coded and implemented into network routers in NS-II. Numerous simulation scenarios are considered and performed. The comparative studies are also conducted by analyzing the NS-2 results. The results have demonstrated the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed RNTO algorithms

Congestion Control Based on Multiple Model Adaptive Control

The congestion controller based on the multiple model adaptive control is designed for the network congestion in TCP/AQM network. As the conventional congestion control is sensitive to the variable network condition, the adaptive control method is adopted in our congestion control. The multiple model adaptive control is introduced in this paper based on the weight calculation instead of the parameter estimation in past adaptive control. The model set is composed by the dynamic model based on the fluid flow. And three “local” congestion controllers are nonlinear output feedback controller based on variable RTT, H2 output feedback controller, and proportional-integral controller, respectively. Ns-2 simulation results in section 4 indicate that the proposed algorithm restrains the congestion in variable network condition and maintains a high throughput together with a low packet drop ratio

Dynamic buffer tuning: an ambience-intelligent way for digital ecosystem success

Ambient intelligence is an important element for the success of digital ecosystems which usually are made up of many collaborating distributed nodes. The operations of these nodes affect one another as chain reactions. When one node had failed, it could bring down the whole ecosystem. Dynamic buffer tuning is an ambience-intelligent mechanism because it has the ability to sense the ambient changes and then makes necessary proactive changes on the fly to avoid buffer overflow. As a result the end-to-end communication channel is more dependable, leading to shorter response time and happier clients. Therefore, dynamic buffer tuning should be generally beneficial to digital ecosystem system performance. In this paper we demonstrate this point by using the FLC (Fuzzy Logic Controller) dynamic buffer tuner to quicken the pervasive medical consultation response of the TCM (Traditional Chinese Medicine) Pervasive Digital HealthCare System as an example

Chronology of the development of Active Queue Management algorithms of RED family. Part 1: from 1993 up to 2005

This work is the first part of a large bibliographic review of active queue management algorithms of the Random Early Detection (RED) family, presented in the scientific press from 1993 to 2023. The first part will provide data on algorithms published from 1993 to 2005

Network delay control through adaptive queue management

Timeliness in delivering packets for delay-sensitive applications is an important QoS (Quality of Service) measure in many systems, notably those that need to provide real-time performance. In such systems, if delay-sensitive traffic is delivered to the destination beyond the deadline, then the packets will be rendered useless and dropped after received at the destination. Bandwidth that is already scarce and shared between network nodes is wasted in relaying these expired packets. This thesis proposes that a deterministic per-hop delay can be achieved by using a dynamic queue threshold concept to bound delay of each node. A deterministic per-hop delay is a key component in guaranteeing a deterministic end-to-end delay. The research aims to develop a generic approach that can constrain network delay of delay-sensitive traffic in a dynamic network. Two adaptive queue management schemes, namely, DTH (Dynamic THreshold) and ADTH (Adaptive DTH) are proposed to realize the claim. Both DTH and ADTH use the dynamic threshold concept to constrain queuing delay so that bounded average queuing delay can be achieved for the former and bounded maximum nodal delay can be achieved for the latter. DTH is an analytical approach, which uses queuing theory with superposition of N MMBP-2 (Markov Modulated Bernoulli Process) arrival processes to obtain a mapping relationship between average queuing delay and an appropriate queuing threshold, for queue management. While ADTH is an measurement-based algorithmic approach that can respond to the time-varying link quality and network dynamics in wireless ad hoc networks to constrain network delay. It manages a queue based on system performance measurements and feedback of error measured against a target delay requirement. Numerical analysis and Matlab simulation have been carried out for DTH for the purposes of validation and performance analysis. While ADTH has been evaluated in NS-2 simulation and implemented in a multi-hop wireless ad hoc network testbed for performance analysis. Results show that DTH and ADTH can constrain network delay based on the specified delay requirements, with higher packet loss as a trade-off

A Fairness Investigation on Active Queue Management Schemes in Wireless Local Area Network

Active Queue Management (AQM) is scheme to handle network congestion before it happened by deciding which packet has to be dropped, when to drop it, and through which port have to drop when it has become or is becoming congested. Furthermore, AQM schemes such as Random Early Detection (RED), Random Early Marking (REM), Adaptive Virtual Queue (AVQ), and Controlled Delay (CoDel) have been proposed to maintain fairness when unresponsive constant bit rate UDP flows share a bottleneck link with responsive TCP traffic. However, the performance of these fair AQM schemes need more investigation especially evaluation in WLANs environment. This paper provides an experimental evaluation of different AQM schemes in WLAN environment with presence of two different types of flows (TCP flows and UDP flows) to study the behavior of these AQM schemes which might punish some flows unfairly. The simulation method has conducted in this paper by using Network Simulation 2 (ns-2) with the topology of bottleneck scenario. The result has shown that REM and AVQ both obtain higher fairness value than RED and Codel. However, CoDel has given the lowest fairness comparing with RED scheme which have given a moderated value in terms of fairness in WLANs environment. Besides, AQM schemes must be chosen not only based on its performance or capability to indicate the congestion and recovering overflow situation but also considering fairness with different types of flows and the environment as well, such as WLANs environment

Stable and scalable congestion control for high-speed heterogeneous networks

For any congestion control mechanisms, the most fundamental design objectives are stability and scalability. However, achieving both properties are very challenging in such a heterogeneous environment as the Internet. From the end-users' perspective, heterogeneity is due to the fact that different flows have different routing paths and therefore different communication delays, which can significantly affect stability of the entire system. In this work, we successfully address this problem by first proving a sufficient and necessary condition for a system to be stable under arbitrary delay. Utilizing this result, we design a series of practical congestion control protocols (MKC and JetMax) that achieve stability regardless of delay as well as many additional appealing properties. From the routers' perspective, the system is heterogeneous because the incoming traffic is a mixture of short- and long-lived, TCP and non-TCP flows. This imposes a severe challenge on traditional buffer sizing mechanisms, which are derived using the simplistic model of a single or multiple synchronized long-lived TCP flows. To overcome this problem, we take a control-theoretic approach and design a new intelligent buffer sizing scheme called Adaptive Buffer Sizing (ABS), which based on the current incoming traffic, dynamically sets the optimal buffer size under the target performance constraints. Our extensive simulation results demonstrate that ABS exhibits quick responses to changes of traffic load, scalability to a large number of incoming flows, and robustness to generic Internet traffic