Performance Optimization and Dynamics Control for Large-scale Data Transfer in Wide-area Networks

Transport control plays an important role in the performance of large-scale scientific and media streaming applications involving transfer of large data sets, media streaming, online computational steering, interactive visualization, and remote instrument control. In general, these applications have two distinctive classes of transport requirements: large-scale scientific applications require high bandwidths to move bulk data across wide-area networks, while media streaming applications require stable bandwidths to ensure smooth media playback. Unfortunately, the widely deployed Transmission Control Protocol is inadequate for such tasks due to its performance limitations. The purpose of this dissertation is to conduct rigorous analytical study of the design and performance of transport solutions, and develop an integrated transport solution in a systematical way to overcome the limitations of current transport methods. One of the primary challenges is to explore and compose a set of feasible route options with multiple constraints. Another challenge essentially arises from the randomness inherent in wide-area networks, particularly the Internet. This randomness must be explicitly accounted for to achieve both goodput maximization and stabilization over the constructed routes by suitably adjusting the source rate in response to both network and host dynamics.The superior and robust performance of the proposed transport solution is extensively evaluated in a simulated environment and further verified through real-life implementations and deployments over both Internet and dedicated connections under disparate network conditions in comparison with existing transport methods

Network coding meets multimedia: a review

While every network node only relays messages in a traditional communication system, the recent network coding (NC) paradigm proposes to implement simple in-network processing with packet combinations in the nodes. NC extends the concept of "encoding" a message beyond source coding (for compression) and channel coding (for protection against errors and losses). It has been shown to increase network throughput compared to traditional networks implementation, to reduce delay and to provide robustness to transmission errors and network dynamics. These features are so appealing for multimedia applications that they have spurred a large research effort towards the development of multimedia-specific NC techniques. This paper reviews the recent work in NC for multimedia applications and focuses on the techniques that fill the gap between NC theory and practical applications. It outlines the benefits of NC and presents the open challenges in this area. The paper initially focuses on multimedia-specific aspects of network coding, in particular delay, in-network error control, and mediaspecific error control. These aspects permit to handle varying network conditions as well as client heterogeneity, which are critical to the design and deployment of multimedia systems. After introducing these general concepts, the paper reviews in detail two applications that lend themselves naturally to NC via the cooperation and broadcast models, namely peer-to-peer multimedia streaming and wireless networkin

Exploiting the power of multiplicity: a holistic survey of network-layer multipath

The Internet is inherently a multipath network: For an underlying network with only a single path, connecting various nodes would have been debilitatingly fragile. Unfortunately, traditional Internet technologies have been designed around the restrictive assumption of a single working path between a source and a destination. The lack of native multipath support constrains network performance even as the underlying network is richly connected and has redundant multiple paths. Computer networks can exploit the power of multiplicity, through which a diverse collection of paths is resource pooled as a single resource, to unlock the inherent redundancy of the Internet. This opens up a new vista of opportunities, promising increased throughput (through concurrent usage of multiple paths) and increased reliability and fault tolerance (through the use of multiple paths in backup/redundant arrangements). There are many emerging trends in networking that signify that the Internet's future will be multipath, including the use of multipath technology in data center computing; the ready availability of multiple heterogeneous radio interfaces in wireless (such as Wi-Fi and cellular) in wireless devices; ubiquity of mobile devices that are multihomed with heterogeneous access networks; and the development and standardization of multipath transport protocols such as multipath TCP. The aim of this paper is to provide a comprehensive survey of the literature on network-layer multipath solutions. We will present a detailed investigation of two important design issues, namely, the control plane problem of how to compute and select the routes and the data plane problem of how to split the flow on the computed paths. The main contribution of this paper is a systematic articulation of the main design issues in network-layer multipath routing along with a broad-ranging survey of the vast literature on network-layer multipathing. We also highlight open issues and identify directions for future work

Optimization-based rate control in overlay multicast.

Zhang Lin.Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2004.Includes bibliographical references (leaves 74-78).Abstracts in English and Chinese.Chapter Chapter 1 --- Introduction --- p.1Chapter 1.1 --- Why use economic models? --- p.1Chapter 1.2 --- Why Overlay? --- p.2Chapter 1.3 --- Our Contribution --- p.3Chapter 1.4 --- Thesis Organization --- p.5Chapter Chapter 2 --- Related Works --- p.7Chapter 2.1 --- Overlay Multicast --- p.7Chapter 2.2 --- IP Multicast Congestion Control --- p.11Chapter 2.2.1 --- Architecture Elements of IP Multicast Congestion Control --- p.11Chapter 2.2.2 --- Evaluation of Multicast Video --- p.13Chapter 2.2.3 --- End-to-End Schemes --- p.14Chapter 2.2.4 --- Router-supported Schemes --- p.16Chapter 2.2.5 --- Conclusion --- p.19Chapter 2.3 --- Optimization-based Rate Control in IP unicast and multicast --- p.20Chapter 2.3.1 --- Optimization-based Rate Control for Unicast Sessions --- p.21Chapter 2.3.2 --- Optimization-based Rate Control for Multi-rate Multicast Sessions --- p.24Chapter Chapter 3 --- Overlay Multicast Rate Control Algorithms --- p.27Chapter 3.1 --- Motivations --- p.27Chapter 3.2 --- Problem Statement --- p.28Chapter 3.2.1 --- Network Model --- p.28Chapter 3.2.2 --- Problem Formulation --- p.29Chapter 3.2.3 --- Algorithm Requirement --- p.33Chapter 3.3 --- Primal-based Algorithm --- p.34Chapter 3.3.1 --- Notations --- p.34Chapter 3.3.2 --- An Iterative Algorithm --- p.36Chapter 3.3.3 --- Convergence Analysis --- p.37Chapter 3.3.3.1 --- Assumptions --- p.37Chapter 3.3.3.2 --- Convergence with various step-sizes --- p.39Chapter 3.3.3.3 --- Theorem Explanations --- p.39Chapter 3.4 --- Dual-based Algorithm --- p.40Chapter 3.4.1 --- The Dual Problem --- p.41Chapter 3.4.2 --- Subgradient Algorithm --- p.43Chapter 3.4.3 --- Interpretation of the Prices --- p.44Chapter 3.4.4 --- Convergence Analysis --- p.45Chapter Chapter 4 --- Protocol Description and Performance Evaluation --- p.47Chapter 4.1 --- Motivations --- p.47Chapter 4.2 --- Protocols --- p.47Chapter 4.2.1 --- Notations --- p.48Chapter 4.2.2 --- Protocol for primal-based algorithm --- p.48Chapter 4.2.3 --- Protocol for dual-based algorithm --- p.53Chapter 4.3 --- Performance Evaluation --- p.57Chapter 4.3.1 --- Simulation Setup --- p.57Chapter 4.3.2 --- Rate Convergence Properties --- p.59Chapter 4.3.3 --- Data Rate Constraint --- p.67Chapter 4.3.4 --- Link Measurement Overhead --- p.68Chapter 4.3.5 --- Communication Overhead --- p.70Chapter Chapter 5 --- Conclusion Remarks and Future Work --- p.73References --- p.7