Exploiting Traffic Balancing and Multicast Efficiency in Distributed Video-on-Demand Architectures

Distributed Video-on-Demand (DVoD) systems are proposed as a solution to the limited streaming capacity and null scalability of centralized systems. In a previous work, we proposed a fully distributed large-scale VoD architecture, called Double P-Tree, which has shown itself to be a good approach to the design of flexible and scalable DVoD systems. In this paper, we present relevant design aspects related to video mapping and traffic balancing in order to improve Double P-Tree architecture performance. Our simulation results demonstrate that these techniques yield a more efficient system and considerably increase its streaming capacity. The results also show the crucial importance of topology connectivity in improving multicasting performance in DVoD systems. Finally, a comparison among several DVoD architectures was performed using simulation, and the results show that the Double P-Tree architecture incorporating mapping and load balancing policies outperforms similar DVoD architectures.This work was supported by the MCyT-Spain under contract TIC 2001-2592 and partially supported by the Generalitat de Catalunya- Grup de Recerca Consolidat 2001SGR-00218

Multicasting in Network Function Virtualization (NFV) Environment

Network Function Virtualization is a growing concept in the research field because of its ability to decouple network functions, like network address translation (NAT), domain name service (DNS), firewall, intrusion detection (IDS) etc., from proprietary hardware equipment. They can now run in software making the network more flexible and agile. This also reduces hardware and maintenance costs of the network. Nowadays many applications use multicasting as it saves a huge amount of communication bandwidth. But many packets need intermediary processing before reaching their destinations. For this processing, Virtual Network functions (VNFs) are implemented in the network where processing of packets takes place. Because of this the path through which the packets traverse changes, and delay increases. This project considers different number and placements of VNFs in four real-world topologies namely NSFNET, Cost239, Arpanet and Random12, and observes the delay for every case. As the VNFs are duplicated on different nodes in the network, the cost of deployment and maintenance of VNFs is increased, but the delay decreases up to a certain number of VNFs. After this, the delay becomes constant. This project presents this trade-off between cost and delay

The Changing Patterns of Internet Usage

The Internet unquestionably represents one of the most important technological developments in recent history. It has revolutionized the way people communicate with one another and obtain information and created an unimaginable variety of commercial and leisure activities. Interestingly, many members of the engineering community often observe that the current network is ill-suited to handle the demands that end users are placing on it. Indeed, engineering researchers often describe the network as ossified and impervious to significant architectural change. As a result, both the U.S. and the European Commission are sponsoring “clean slate” projects to study how the Internet might be designed differently if it were designed from scratch today. This Essay explores emerging trends that are transforming the way end users are using the Internet and examine their implications both for network architecture and public policy. These trends include Internet protocol video, wireless broadband, cloud computing programmable networking, and pervasive computing and sensor networks. It discusses how these changes in the way people are using the network may require the network to evolve in new directions

The Changing Patterns of Internet Usage

The Internet unquestionably represents one of the most important technological developments in recent history. It has revolutionized the way people communicate with one another and obtain information and created an unimaginable variety of commercial and leisure activities. Interestingly, many members of the engineering community often observe that the current network is ill-suited to handle the demands that end users are placing on it. Indeed, engineering researchers often describe the network as ossified and impervious to significant architectural change. As a result, both the U.S. and the European Commission are sponsoring “clean slate” projects to study how the Internet might be designed differently if it were designed from scratch today. This Essay explores emerging trends that are transforming the way end users are using the Internet and examine their implications both for network architecture and public policy. These trends include Internet protocol video, wireless broadband, cloud computing programmable networking, and pervasive computing and sensor networks. It discusses how these changes in the way people are using the network may require the network to evolve in new directions

The Changing Patterns of Internet Usage

Symposium: Essays from Time Warner Cable\u27s Research Program on Digital Communications

Multicast source mobility support for regenerative satellite networks

YesSatellite communications provides an effective solution to the ever increasing demand for mobile and ubiquitous communications especially in areas where terrestrial communication infrastructure is not present. IP multicasting is a bandwidth saving technology which could become an indispensable means of group communication over satellites since it can utilise the scarce and expensive satellite resources in an efficient way. In Source-Specific Multicast (SSM) the data is sent through a multicast tree from the source to all the receivers. However, if a source is a mobile node moving from one network to another, then special mechanisms are required to make sure this multicast tree does not break. Until now, while many research efforts have been made to provide IP multicast for the mobile nodes, they are mainly focused on terrestrial networks. Unfortunately, the terrestrial mobile multicast schemes are not directly applicable in a satellite environment. This paper, proposes a new mechanism to support multicast source mobility in SSM based applications for a mesh multi-beam satellite network with receivers both within the satellite network and in the Internet. In the proposed mechanism, the SSM receivers continue to receive multicast traffic from the mobile source despite the fact that the IP address of the source keeps on changing as it changes its point of attachment from one satellite gateway (GW) to another. The proposed scheme is evaluated and the results compared with the mobile IP home subscription (MIP HS)-based approach. The results show that the proposed scheme outperforms the MIP HS-based approach in terms of signalling cost and packet delivery cost

Managing dynamic groups in QoS and overlay multicasting

Multicasting has been the most popular mechanism for supporting group communication, wherein group members communicate through a multicast data distribution tree that spans all the members of the group. In a dynamic multicast session, members join/leave the group using graft/prune mechanisms, based on locally optimal paths, which would eventually degenerate the quality of the multicast tree. Therefore, efficient mechanisms need to be invoked periodically to maintain the cost of the multicast tree near optimal. However, tree maintenance would result in service disruption for the session. Therefore, there exists a trade-off between minimizing tree cost and minimizing service disruption. The goal of this dissertation is to develop and analyze a set of efficient tree maintenance techniques that aim to balance this tradeoff in QoS and overlay multicasting. To achieve this goal, the dissertation makes three key contributions. First, the design of scalable protocols, viz. tree migration and tree evolution, for maintaining QoS multicast trees. Second, the design of an efficient strategy, called partial protection approach, and its implementation methods for member join problem with path reliability being a QoS constraint. Third, the design of an efficient tree maintenance algorithm, based on the idea of mesh-tree interactions, for end-system based overlay multicasting. The proposed tree maintenance solutions have been evaluated and analyzed through a combination of simulation and analytical studies. The studies show that the proposed solutions indeed achieve a good balance between tree cost and service disruption competitively

Snapshots of the EYES project

The EYES project (IST-2001-34734) is a three years European research project on self-organizing and collaborative energy-efficient sensor networks. It addresses the convergence of distributed information processing, wireless communications, and mobile computing. The goal of the project is to develop the architecture and the technology which enables the creation of a new generation of sensors that can effectively network together so as to provide a flexible platform for the support of a large variety of mobile sensor network applications. This paper provides a broad overview of the EYES project and highlights some approaches and results of the architecture