MPTCP meets FEC: Supporting Latency-Sensitive Applications over Heterogeneous Networks

Over the past years, TCP has gone through numerous updates to provide performance enhancement under diverse network conditions. However, with respect to losses, little can be achieved with legacy TCP detection and recovery mechanisms. Both fast retransmission and retransmission timeout take at least one extra round trip time to perform, and this might significantly impact performance of latency-sensitive applications, especially in lossy or high delay networks. While forward error correction (FEC) is not a new initiative in this direction, the majority of the approaches consider FEC inside the application. In this paper, we design and implement a framework, where FEC is integrated within TCP. Our main goal with this design choice is to enable latency sensitive applications over TCP in high delay and lossy networks, but remaining application agnostic. We further incorporate this design into multipath TCP (MPTCP), where we focus particularly on heterogeneous settings, considering the fact that TCP recovery mechanisms further escalate head-of-line blocking in multipath. We evaluate the performance of the proposed framework and show that such a framework can bring significant benefits compared to legacy TCP and MPTCP for latency-sensitive real application traffic, such as video streaming and web services.Comment: 14 pages, 54 figures, IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networkin

Building the Future Internet through FIRE

The Internet as we know it today is the result of a continuous activity for improving network communications, end user services, computational processes and also information technology infrastructures. The Internet has become a critical infrastructure for the human-being by offering complex networking services and end-user applications that all together have transformed all aspects, mainly economical, of our lives. Recently, with the advent of new paradigms and the progress in wireless technology, sensor networks and information systems and also the inexorable shift towards everything connected paradigm, first as known as the Internet of Things and lately envisioning into the Internet of Everything, a data-driven society has been created. In a data-driven society, productivity, knowledge, and experience are dependent on increasingly open, dynamic, interdependent and complex Internet services. The challenge for the Internet of the Future design is to build robust enabling technologies, implement and deploy adaptive systems, to create business opportunities considering increasing uncertainties and emergent systemic behaviors where humans and machines seamlessly cooperate

Building the Future Internet through FIRE

The Internet as we know it today is the result of a continuous activity for improving network communications, end user services, computational processes and also information technology infrastructures. The Internet has become a critical infrastructure for the human-being by offering complex networking services and end-user applications that all together have transformed all aspects, mainly economical, of our lives. Recently, with the advent of new paradigms and the progress in wireless technology, sensor networks and information systems and also the inexorable shift towards everything connected paradigm, first as known as the Internet of Things and lately envisioning into the Internet of Everything, a data-driven society has been created. In a data-driven society, productivity, knowledge, and experience are dependent on increasingly open, dynamic, interdependent and complex Internet services. The challenge for the Internet of the Future design is to build robust enabling technologies, implement and deploy adaptive systems, to create business opportunities considering increasing uncertainties and emergent systemic behaviors where humans and machines seamlessly cooperate

Automotive Cognitive Access: Towards customized vehicular communication system

The evolution of Software Defined Networking (SDN) and Virtualization of mobile Network Functions (NFV) have enabled the new ways of managing mobile access systems and are seen as a major technological foundation of the Fifth Generation (5G) of mobile networks. With the appearance of 5G specifications, the mobile system architecture has the transition from a network of entities to a network of functions. This paradigm shift led to new possibilities and challenges. Existing mobile communication systems rely on closed and inflexible hardware-based architectures both at the access and core network. It implies significant challenges in implementing new techniques to maximize the network capacity, scalability and increasing performance for diverse data services. This work focuses preliminary on the architectural evolutions needed to solve challenges perceived for the next generation of mobile networks. I consider Software defined plus Virtualization featured Mobile Network (S+ MN) architecture as a baseline reference model, aiming at the further improvements to support the access requirements for diverse user groups. I consider an important class of things, vehicles, which needs efficient mobile internet access at both the system and application levels. I identify and describe key requirements of emerging vehicular communications and assess existing standards to determine their limitations. To provide optimized wireless communications for the specific user group, the 5G systems come up with network slicing as a potential solution to create customized networks. Network slicing has the capability to facilitates dynamic and efficient allocation of network resources and support diverse service scenarios and services. A network slice can be broadly defined as an end-to-end logically isolated network that includes end devices as well as access and core network functions. To this effect, I describe the enhanced behaviour of S+ MN architecture for the collection of network resources and details the potential functional grouping provided by S+ MN architecture that paves the way to support automotive slicing. The proposed enhancements support seamless connection mobility addressing the automotive access use case highly mobile environment. I follow the distribution of gateway functions to solve the problem of unnecessary long routes and delays. Exploiting the open SDN capabilities, the proposed S+ NC is able to parallelize the execution of certain control plane messages thus enabling the signalling optimisation. Furthermore, it enables the (Re)selection of efficient data plane paths with implied upper-layer service continuity mechanisms that remove the chains of IP address preservation for session continuity during IP anchor relocation. An implementation setup validates the proposed evolutions, including its core functionalities implemented using the ns-3 network simulator. The proposed slicing scheme has been evaluated through a number of scenarios such as numbers of signalling messages processed by control entities for an intersystem handover procedure relative to current mobile network architecture. I also perform the performance improvement analysis based on simulation results. Furthermore, I experimentally prove the feasibility of using Multipath TCP for connection mobility in intersystem handover scenario. The experiments run over the Linux Kernel implementation of Multipath TCP developed over the last years. I extend the Multipath TCP path management to delegates the management of the data paths according to the application needs. The implementation results have shown that the proposed S+ MN slicing architecture and enhancements achieve benefits in multiple areas, for example improving the mobility control and management, maintaining QoS, smooth handover, session continuity and efficient slice management and orchestration