A CLUSTERING-BASED SELECTIVE PROBING FRAMEWORK TO SUPPORT INTERNET QUALITY OF SERVICE ROUTING

The advent of the multimedia applications has triggered widespread interest in QoS supports. Two Internet-based QoS frameworks have been proposed: Integrated Services (IntServ) and Differentiated Services (DiffServ). IntServ supports service guarantees on a per-flow basis. The framework, however, is not scalable due to the fact that routers have to maintain a large amount of state information for each supported flow. DiffServ was proposed as an alternate solution to address the lack of scalability of the IntServ framework. DiffServ uses class-based service differentiation to achieve aggregate support for QoS requirements. This approach eliminates the need to maintain per-flow states on a hop-by-hop basis and reduces considerably the overhead routers incur in forwarding traffic.Both IntServ and DiffServ frameworks focus on packet scheduling. As such, they decouple routing from QoS provisioning. This typically results in inefficient routes, thereby limiting the ability of the network to support QoS requirements and to manage resources efficiently. The goal of this thesis is to address this shortcoming. We propose a scalable QoS routing framework to identify and select paths that are very likely to meet the QoS requirements of the underlying applications. The tenet of our approach is based on seamlessly integrating routing into the DiffServ framework to extend its ability to support QoS requirements. Scalability is achieved using selective probing and clustering to reduce signaling and routers overhead.The major contributions of this thesis are as follows: First, we propose a scalable routing architecture that supports QoS requirements. The architecture seamlessly integrates the QoS traffic requirements of the underlying applications into a DiffServ framework. Second, we propose a new delay-based clustering method, referred to as d-median. The proposed clustering method groups Internet nodes into clusters, whereby nodes in the same cluster exhibit equivalent delay characteristics. Each cluster is represented by anchor node. Anchors use selective probing to estimate QoS parameters and select appropriate paths for traffic forwarding. A thorough study to evaluate the performance of the proposed d-median clustering algorithm is conducted. The results of the study show that, for power-law graphs such as the Internet, the d-median clustering based approach outperforms the set covering method commonly proposed in the literature. The study shows that the widely used clustering methods, such as set covering or k-median, are inadequate to capture the balance between cluster sizes and the number of clusters. The results of the study also show that the proposed clustering method, applied to power-law graphs, is robust to changes in size and delay distribution of the network. Finally, the results suggest that the delay bound input parameter of the d-median scheme should be no less than 1 and no more than 4 times of the average delay per one hop of the network. This is mostly due to the weak hierarchy of the Internet resulting from its power-law structure and the prevalence of the small-world property

Internet data packet transport: from global topology to local queueing dynamics

We study structural feature and evolution of the Internet at the autonomous systems level. Extracting relevant parameters for the growth dynamics of the Internet topology, we construct a toy model for the Internet evolution, which includes the ingredients of multiplicative stochastic evolution of nodes and edges and adaptive rewiring of edges. The model reproduces successfully structural features of the Internet at a fundamental level. We also introduce a quantity called the load as the capacity of node needed for handling the communication traffic and study its time-dependent behavior at the hubs across years. The load at hub increases with network size $N$ as $\sim N^{1.8}$. Finally, we study data packet traffic in the microscopic scale. The average delay time of data packets in a queueing system is calculated, in particular, when the number of arrival channels is scale-free. We show that when the number of arriving data packets follows a power law distribution, $\sim n^{-\lambda}$, the queue length distribution decays as $n^{1-\lambda}$ and the average delay time at the hub diverges as $\sim N^{(3-\lambda)/(\gamma-1)}$ in the $N \to \infty$ limit when $2 < \lambda < 3$, $\gamma$ being the network degree exponent.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figures, submitted to International Journal of Bifurcation and Chao

Fronthaul-Constrained Cloud Radio Access Networks: Insights and Challenges

As a promising paradigm for fifth generation (5G) wireless communication systems, cloud radio access networks (C-RANs) have been shown to reduce both capital and operating expenditures, as well as to provide high spectral efficiency (SE) and energy efficiency (EE). The fronthaul in such networks, defined as the transmission link between a baseband unit (BBU) and a remote radio head (RRH), requires high capacity, but is often constrained. This article comprehensively surveys recent advances in fronthaul-constrained C-RANs, including system architectures and key techniques. In particular, key techniques for alleviating the impact of constrained fronthaul on SE/EE and quality of service for users, including compression and quantization, large-scale coordinated processing and clustering, and resource allocation optimization, are discussed. Open issues in terms of software-defined networking, network function virtualization, and partial centralization are also identified.Comment: 5 Figures, accepted by IEEE Wireless Communications. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1407.3855 by other author