TCP in the Internet of Things: from ostracism to prominence

© 2018 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.TCP has traditionally been neglected as a transport-layer protocol for the Internet of Things (IoT). However, recent trends and industry needs are favoring TCP presence in IoT environments. In this article, we describe the main IoT scenarios where TCP will be used. We then analyze the historically claimed issues of TCP in the IoT context. We argue that, in contrast to generally accepted wisdom, most of those possible issues fall in one of the following categories: i) are also found in well-accepted IoT end-to-end reliability mechanisms, ii) can be solved, or iii) are not actual issues. Considering the future prominent role of TCP in the IoT, we provide recommendations for lightweight TCP implementation and suitable operation in such scenarios, based on our IETF standardization work on the topic.Postprint (author's final draft

Mobile Networking

We point out the different performance problems that need to be addressed when considering mobility in IP networks. We also define the reference architecture and present a framework to classify the different solutions for mobility management in IP networks. The performance of the major candidate micro-mobility solutions is evaluated for both real-time (UDP) and data (TCP) traffic through simulation and by means of an analytical model. Using these models we compare the performance of different mobility management schemes for different data and real-time services and the network resources that are needed for it. We point out the problems of TCP in wireless environments and review some proposed enhancements to TCP that aim at improving TCP performance. We make a detailed study of how some of micro-mobility protocols namely Cellular IP, Hawaii and Hierarchical Mobile IP affect the behavior of TCP and their interaction with the MAC layer. We investigate the impact of handoffs on TCP by means of simulation traces that show the evolution of segments and acknowledgments during handoffs.Publicad

Network emulation focusing on QoS-Oriented satellite communication

This chapter proposes network emulation basics and a complete case study of QoS-oriented Satellite Communication

A quantitative analysis and performance study of fast congestion notification (FN) mechanism

Congestion in computer network happens when the number of transmission requests exceeds the transmission capacity at a certain network point (called a bottle-neck resource) at a specific time. Congestion usually causes buffers overflow and packets loss. The purpose of congestion management is to maintain a balance between the transmission requests and the transmission capacity so that the bottle-neck resources operate on an optimal level, and the sources are offered service in a way that assures fairness. Fast Congestion Notification (FN) is one of the proactive queue management mechanisms that limits the queuing delay and achieves the maximum link utilization possible with minimum packet drops. In this paper we present a detailed performance comparison of the Linear FN algorithm to RED based on the results obtained through simulations. The paper shows how FN can be tuned for different window size (Ws) and periods of time constant (T) to achieve higher link utilization; reduce the queuing delay, and lower packet drop ratio

Revisiting Old Friends: Is CoDel Really Achieving What RED Cannot?

We use ns-2 simulations to compare RED's gentle mode to CoDel in terms of their ability to reduce the latency for various TCP variants. We use a common dumbbell topology with Pareto background traffic, and measure the packet delays and transmission time of a 10MB FTP transfer. In our scenarios, we find that CoDel reduces the latency by 87%, but RED still manages to reduce it by 75%. However, the use of CoDel results in a transmission time 42% longer than when using RED. In light of its maturity, we therefore argue that RED could be considered as a good candidate to tackle Bufferbloat

Managing Network Delay for Browser Multiplayer Games

Latency is one of the key performance elements affecting the quality of experience (QoE) in computer games. Latency in the context of games can be defined as the time between the user input and the result on the screen. In order for the QoE to be satisfactory the game needs to be able to react fast enough to player input. In networked multiplayer games, latency is composed of network delay and local delays. Some major sources of network delay are queuing delay and head-of-line (HOL) blocking delay. Network delay in the Internet can be even in the order of seconds. In this thesis we discuss what feasible networking solutions exist for browser multiplayer games. We conduct a literature study to analyze the Differentiated Services architecture, some salient Active Queue Management (AQM) algorithms (RED, PIE, CoDel and FQ-CoDel), the Explicit Congestion Notification (ECN) concept and network protocols for web browser (WebSocket, QUIC and WebRTC). RED, PIE and CoDel as single-queue implementations would be sub-optimal for providing low latency to game traffic. FQ-CoDel is a multi-queue AQM and provides flow separation that is able to prevent queue-building bulk transfers from notably hampering latency-sensitive flows. WebRTC Data-Channel seems promising for games since it can be used for sending arbitrary application data and it can avoid HOL blocking. None of the network protocols, however, provide completely satisfactory support for the transport needs of multiplayer games: WebRTC is not designed for client-server connections, QUIC is not designed for traffic patterns typical for multiplayer games and WebSocket would require parallel connections to mitigate the effects of HOL blocking

Operating ranges, tunability and performance of CoDel and PIE

COMCOM-D-15-00474R1 This work was part-funded by the European Community under its Seventh Framework Programme through the Reducing Internet Transport Latency (RITE) project (ICT-317700). The views expressed are solely those of the authors.Peer reviewedPostprin