303 research outputs found
Endpoint-transparent Multipath Transport with Software-defined Networks
Multipath forwarding consists of using multiple paths simultaneously to
transport data over the network. While most such techniques require endpoint
modifications, we investigate how multipath forwarding can be done inside the
network, transparently to endpoint hosts. With such a network-centric approach,
packet reordering becomes a critical issue as it may cause critical performance
degradation.
We present a Software Defined Network architecture which automatically sets
up multipath forwarding, including solutions for reordering and performance
improvement, both at the sending side through multipath scheduling algorithms,
and the receiver side, by resequencing out-of-order packets in a dedicated
in-network buffer.
We implemented a prototype with commonly available technology and evaluated
it in both emulated and real networks. Our results show consistent throughput
improvements, thanks to the use of aggregated path capacity. We give
comparisons to Multipath TCP, where we show our approach can achieve a similar
performance while offering the advantage of endpoint transparency
Development of a building information modelling (BIM) migration path model for construction professionals
The construction professionals have the notion that by implementing Building
Information Modelling (BIM) in construction could overcome problems such as delay,
cost overrun, clashes in project design and undesirable quality in construction.
However, they failed to take the advantages of the BIM benefit as they are still trying
to find the best way to take on board the BIM into current practices. Most of the
professionals do not know ‘when’ and ‘how’ to apply BIM throughout the construction
lifecycle. Several research models related to BIM has been developed to improve and
encourage BIM implementation. Nevertheless, the developed models have limitations
in highlighting the steps involved that could assist the construction professionals in
implementing BIM effectively in Malaysia. Therefore, this research is aimed to
develop a model that would be able to assist Malaysian construction professionals in
implementing BIM in a structured way. A semi-structured interview was carried out
with respondents that have various experienced and currently involved in BIM projects
in the Malaysian construction industry. Findings show that the construction
professionals are lacking in knowledge and experience in using BIM in various stages
of construction. Thus, they were unable to fully capitalise the benefit of 3D models.
Migration path model was proposed and evaluated as a strategic approach for BIM
implementation in the Malaysian construction industry. The identification of five (5)
activities (BIM Awareness, Develop BIM Strategy, Implement BIM, Monitor BIM
and Expand BIM Implementation) with the three (3) enablers (BIM work contract,
BIM work process and BIM technology) in the model is expected to be able to assist
construction professionals to implement BIM with the right BIM concept and later, the
benefit could be obtained for improving construction project. The proposed model
could be as a guideline for construction professionals in implementing BIM,
specifically in countries that new in BIM. The model is also expected to be able to fill
the gap in BIM implementation by supporting the initiatives by the Malaysian
government for increasing productivity in construction projects by using new
technology like BIM
Datacenter Traffic Control: Understanding Techniques and Trade-offs
Datacenters provide cost-effective and flexible access to scalable compute
and storage resources necessary for today's cloud computing needs. A typical
datacenter is made up of thousands of servers connected with a large network
and usually managed by one operator. To provide quality access to the variety
of applications and services hosted on datacenters and maximize performance, it
deems necessary to use datacenter networks effectively and efficiently.
Datacenter traffic is often a mix of several classes with different priorities
and requirements. This includes user-generated interactive traffic, traffic
with deadlines, and long-running traffic. To this end, custom transport
protocols and traffic management techniques have been developed to improve
datacenter network performance.
In this tutorial paper, we review the general architecture of datacenter
networks, various topologies proposed for them, their traffic properties,
general traffic control challenges in datacenters and general traffic control
objectives. The purpose of this paper is to bring out the important
characteristics of traffic control in datacenters and not to survey all
existing solutions (as it is virtually impossible due to massive body of
existing research). We hope to provide readers with a wide range of options and
factors while considering a variety of traffic control mechanisms. We discuss
various characteristics of datacenter traffic control including management
schemes, transmission control, traffic shaping, prioritization, load balancing,
multipathing, and traffic scheduling. Next, we point to several open challenges
as well as new and interesting networking paradigms. At the end of this paper,
we briefly review inter-datacenter networks that connect geographically
dispersed datacenters which have been receiving increasing attention recently
and pose interesting and novel research problems.Comment: Accepted for Publication in IEEE Communications Surveys and Tutorial
Reliable Video Streaming over mmWave with Multi Connectivity and Network Coding
The next generation of multimedia applications will require the
telecommunication networks to support a higher bitrate than today, in order to
deliver virtual reality and ultra-high quality video content to the users. Most
of the video content will be accessed from mobile devices, prompting the
provision of very high data rates by next generation (5G) cellular networks. A
possible enabler in this regard is communication at mmWave frequencies, given
the vast amount of available spectrum that can be allocated to mobile users;
however, the harsh propagation environment at such high frequencies makes it
hard to provide a reliable service. This paper presents a reliable video
streaming architecture for mmWave networks, based on multi connectivity and
network coding, and evaluates its performance using a novel combination of the
ns-3 mmWave module, real video traces and the network coding library Kodo. The
results show that it is indeed possible to reliably stream video over cellular
mmWave links, while the combination of multi connectivity and network coding
can support high video quality with low latency.Comment: To be presented at the 2018 IEEE International Conference on
Computing, Networking and Communications (ICNC), March 2018, Maui, Hawaii,
USA (invited paper). 6 pages, 4 figure
Reducing Transport Latency for Short Flows with Multipath TCP
Multipath TCP (MPTCP) has been an emerging transport protocol that provides network resilience to failures and improves throughput by splitting a data stream into multiple subflows across all the available multiple paths. While MPTCP is generally beneficial for throughput-sensitive large flows with large number of subflows, it may be harmful for latency-sensitive small flows. MPTCP assigns each subflow a congestion window, making short flows susceptible to timeout when a flow only contains a few packets. This condition becomes even worse when the paths have heterogeneous characteristics as packet reordering occurs and the slow paths can be used with MPTCP, causing the increased end-to-end delay and the lower application Goodput. Thus, it is important to choose the appropriate subflows for each MPTCP connection to achieve the good performance. However, the subflows in MPTCP are determined before a connection is established, and they usually remain unchanged during the lifetime of that connection. To address this issue, we propose DMPTCP, which dynamically adjusts the subflows according to application workloads. Specifically, DMPTCP first utilizes the idea of TCP modeling to estimate the latency on the path under scheduling and the data amount sent on the other paths simultaneously, and then decides the set of subflows to be used for certain application periodically with the goal of reducing completion time for short flows and achieving a higher throughput for long flows. We implement DMPTCP in a Linux server and conduct extensive experiments both in NS3 and in Linux testbed to validate its effectiveness. Our evaluation shows that DMPTCP decreases the completion time by over 46.55% compared to conventional MPTCP for short flows while increases the Goodput up to 21.3% for long-lived flows
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