289 research outputs found
Experimental performance of DCCP over live satellite and long range wireless links
We present experimental results for the performance over satellite and long range wireless (WiMax) links of the new TCP-Friendly Rate Control (TFRC) congestion control mechanism from the Datagram Congestion Control Protocol (DCCP) proposed for use with real-time traffic. We evaluate
the performance of the standard DCCP/CCID3 algorithm and
identify two problem areas: the measured DCCP/CCID3 rate
is inferior to the rate achievable with standard TCP and
a significant rate oscillation continuously occurs making the resulting rate variable even in the short term. We analyse the links and identify the potential causes, i.e. long and variable delay and link errors. As a second contribution, we propose a change in the DCCP/CCID3 algorithm in which the number of feedback messages is increased from the currently standard of at least one per return trip time. Although it is recognised that the increase in control traffic may decrease the overall efficiency, we demonstrate that the change results in higher data rates which are closer to what is achievable with TCP on those networks and that the overhead introduced remains acceptable
Evidences Behind Skype Outage
Skype is one of the most successful VoIP application in the current Internet spectrum. One of the most peculiar characteristics of Skype is that it relies on a P2P infrastructure for the exchange of signaling information amongst active peers. During August 2007, an unexpected outage hit the Skype overlay, yielding to a service blackout that lasted for more than two days: this paper aims at throwing light to this event. Leveraging on the use of an accurate Skype classification engine, we carry on an experimental study of Skype signaling during the outage. In particular, we focus on the signaling traffic before, during and after the outage, in the attempt to quantify interesting properties of the event. While it is very difficult to gather clear insights concerning the root causes of the breakdown itself, the collected measurement allow nevertheless to quantify several interesting aspects of the outage: for instance, measurements show that the outage caused, on average, a 3-fold increase of signaling traffic and a 10-fold increase of number of contacted peers, topping to more than 11 million connections for the most active node in our network - which immediately gives the feeling of the extent of the phenomeno
The Bits of Silence : Redundant Traffic in VoIP
Human conversation is characterized by brief pauses and so-called turn-taking behavior between the speakers. In the context of VoIP, this means that there are frequent periods where the microphone captures only background noise – or even silence whenever the microphone is muted. The bits transmitted from such silence periods introduce overhead in terms of data usage, energy consumption, and network infrastructure costs. In this paper, we contribute by shedding light on these costs for VoIP applications. We systematically measure the performance of six popular mobile VoIP applications with controlled human conversation and acoustic setup. Our analysis demonstrates that significant savings can indeed be achievable - with the best performing silence suppression technique being effective on 75% of silent pauses in the conversation in a quiet place. This results in 2-5 times data savings, and 50-90% lower energy consumption compared to the next better alternative. Even then, the effectiveness of silence suppression can be sensitive to the amount of background noise, underlying speech codec, and the device being used. The codec characteristics and performance do not depend on the network type. However, silence suppression makes VoIP traffic network friendly as much as VoLTE traffic. Our results provide new insights into VoIP performance and offer a motivation for further enhancements, such as performance-aware codec selection, that can significantly benefit a wide variety of voice assisted applications, as such intelligent home assistants and other speech codec enabled IoT devices.Peer reviewe
Detailed Analysis of Skype Traffic
Skype is beyond any doubt the VoIP application in the current Internet application spectrum. Its amazing success has drawn the attention of telecom operators and the research commu- nity, both interested in knowing its internal mechanisms, charac- terizing its traffic, understanding its users' behavior. In this paper, we investigate the characteristics of traffic streams generated by voice and video communications, and the signaling traffic generated by Skype. Our approach is twofold, as we make use of both active and passive measurement techniques to gather a deep understanding on the traffic Skype generates. From extensive testbed experiments, we devise a source model which takes into ac- count: i) the service type, i.e., SkypeOut calls or calls between two Skype clients, ii) the selected source Codec, iii) the adopted trans- port layer protocol, and iv) network conditions. Leveraging on the use of an accurate Skype classification engine that we recently pro- posed, we study and characterize Skype traffic based on extensive passive measurements collected from our campus LA
Q-AIMD: A Congestion Aware Video Quality Control Mechanism
Following the constant increase of the multimedia traffic, it seems necessary to allow transport protocols to be aware of the video quality of the transmitted flows rather than the throughput. This paper proposes a novel transport mechanism adapted to video flows. Our proposal, called Q-AIMD for video quality AIMD (Additive Increase Multiplicative Decrease), enables fairness in video quality while transmitting multiple video flows. Targeting video quality fairness allows improving the overall video quality for all transmitted flows, especially when the transmitted videos provide various types of content with different spatial resolutions. In addition, Q-AIMD mitigates the occurrence of network congestion events, and dissolves the congestion whenever it occurs by decreasing the video quality and hence the bitrate. Using different video quality metrics, Q-AIMD is evaluated with different video contents and spatial resolutions. Simulation results show that Q-AIMD allows an improved overall video quality among the multiple transmitted video flows compared to a throughput-based congestion control by decreasing significantly the quality discrepancy between them
Controlo de congestionamento em redes sem fios
Doutoramento em Engenharia ElectrotécnicaCongestion control in wireless networks is an important and open issue.
Previous research has proven the poor performance of the Transport
Control Protocol (TCP) in such networks. The factors that contribute
to the poor performance of TCP in wireless environments concern its
unsuitability to identify/detect and react properly to network events,
its TCP window based
ow control algorithm that is not suitable for
the wireless channel, and the congestion collapse due to mobility. New
rate based mechanisms have been proposed to mitigate TCP performance
in wired and wireless networks. However, these mechanisms
also present poor performance, as they lack of suitable bandwidth estimation
techniques for multi-hop wireless networks.
It is thus important to improve congestion control performance in wireless
networks, incorporating components that are suitable for wireless
environments. A congestion control scheme which provides an e -
cient and fair sharing of the underlying network capacity and available
bandwidth among multiple competing applications is crucial to the definition
of new e cient and fair congestion control schemes on wireless
multi-hop networks.
The Thesis is divided in three parts. First, we present a performance
evaluation study of several congestion control protocols against TCP,
in wireless mesh and ad-hoc networks. The obtained results show that
rate based congestion control protocols need an eficient and accurate
underlying available bandwidth estimation technique. The second part
of the Thesis presents a new link capacity and available bandwidth estimation
mechanism denoted as rt-Winf (real time wireless inference).
The estimation is performed in real-time and without the need to intrusively
inject packets in the network. Simulation results show that
rt-Winf obtains the available bandwidth and capacity estimation with
accuracy and without introducing overhead trafic in the network.
The third part of the Thesis proposes the development of new congestion
control mechanisms to address the congestion control problems
of wireless networks. These congestion control mechanisms use cross
layer information, obtained by rt-Winf, to accurately and eficiently estimate
the available bandwidth and the path capacity over a wireless
network path. Evaluation of these new proposed mechanisms, through
ns-2 simulations, shows that the cooperation between rt-Winf and the
congestion control algorithms is able to significantly increase congestion
control eficiency and network performance.O controlo de congestionamento continua a ser extremamente importante
quando se investiga o desempenho das redes sem fios. Trabalhos
anteriores mostram o mau desempenho do Transport Control Proto-
col (TCP) em redes sem fios. Os fatores que contribuem para um
pior desempenho do TCP nesse tipo de redes s~ao: a sua falta de capacidade
para identificar/detetar e reagir adequadamente a eventos da
rede; a utilização de um algoritmo de controlo de
uxo que não é adequado
para o canal sem fios; e o colapso de congestionamento devido
á mobilidade. Para colmatar este problemas foram propostos novos
mecanismos de controlo de congestionamento baseados na taxa de
transmissão. No entanto, estes mecanismos também apresentam um
pior desempenho em redes sem fios, já que não utilizam mecanismos
adequados para a avaliação da largura de banda disponível. Assim, é
importante para melhorar o desempenho do controlo de congestionamento
em redes sem fios, incluir componentes que são adequados para
esse tipo de ambientes. Um esquema de controlo de congestionamento
que permita uma partilha eficiente e justa da capacidade da rede e da
largura de banda disponível entre múltiplas aplicações concorrentes é
crucial para a definição de novos, eficientes e justos mecanismos de
controlo congestionamento para as redes sem fios.
A Tese está dividida em três partes. Primeiro, apresentamos um estudo
sobre a avaliação de desempenho de vários protocolos de controlo de
congestionamento relativamente ao TCP, em redes sem fios em malha
e ad-hoc. Os resultados obtidos mostram que os protocolos baseados
na taxa de transmissão precisam de uma técnica de avaliação da largura
de banda disponível que seja eficiente e precisa . A segunda parte da
Tese apresenta um novo mecanismo de avaliação da capacidade da
ligação e da largura de banda disponível, designada por rt-Winf (real
time wireless inference). A avaliação é realizada em tempo real e sem
a necessidade de inserir tráfego na rede. Os resultados obtidos através
de simulação e emulação mostram que o rt-Winf obtém com precisão
a largura de banda disponível e a capacidade da ligação sem sobrecarregar
a rede. A terceira parte da Tese propõe novos mecanismos de
controlo de congestionamento em redes sem fios. Estes mecanismos
de controlo de congestionamento apresentam um conjunto de caracter
ísticas novas para melhorar o seu desempenho, de entre as quais
se destaca a utilização da informação de largura de banda disponível
obtida pelo rt-Winf. Os resultados da avaliação destes mecanismos,
utilizando o simulador ns-2, permitem concluir que a cooperação entre
o rt-Winf e os algoritmos de controlo de congestionamento aumenta
significativamente o desempenho da rede
Promoting the use of reliable rate based transport protocols: the Chameleon protocol
Rate-based congestion control, such as TFRC, has not been designed to enable reliability. Indeed, the birth of TFRC protocol has resulted from the need for a congestion-controlled transport protocol in order to carry multimedia traffic. However, certain applications still prefer the use of UDP in order to implement their own congestion control on top of it. The present contribution proposes to design and validate a reliable rate-based protocol based on the combined use of TFRC, SACK and an adapted flow control. We argue that rate-based congestion control is a perfect alternative to window-based congestion control as most of today applications need to interact with the transport layer and should not be only limited to unreliable services. In this paper, we detail the implementation of a reliable rate-based protocol named Chameleon and bring out to the networking community an ns-2 implementation for evaluation purpose
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