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

Improving TCP behaviour to non-invasively share spectrum with safety messages in VANET

There is a broad range of technologies available for wireless communications for moving vehicles, such as Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access (WiMax), 3G, Dedicated Short Range Communication (DSRC)/ Wireless Access for Vehicular Environment (WAVE) and Mobile Broadband Wireless Access (MBWA). These technologies are needed to support delay-sensitive safety related applications such as collision avoidance and emergency breaking. Among them, the IEEE802.11p standard (aka DSRC/WAVE), a Wi-Fi based medium RF range technology, is considered to be one of the best suited draft architectures for time-sensitive safety applications. In addition to safety applications, however, services of non-safety nature like electronic toll tax collection, infotainment and traffic control are also becoming important these days. To support delay-insensitive infotainment applications, the DSRC protocol suite also provides facilities to use Internet Protocols. The DSRC architecture actually consists of WAVE Short Messaging Protocol (WSMP) specifically formulated for realtime safety applications as well as the conventional transport layer protocols TCP/UDP for non-safety purposes. But the layer four protocol TCP was originally designed for reliable data delivery only over wired networks, and so the performance quality was not guaranteed for the wireless medium, especially in the highly unstable network topology engendered by fast moving vehicles. The vehicular wireless medium is inherently unreliable because of intermittent disconnections caused by moving vehicles, and in addition, it suffers from multi-path and fading phenomena (and a host of others) that greatly degrade the network performance. One of the TCP problems in the context of vehicular wireless network is that it interprets transmission errors as symptomatic of an incipient congestion situation and as a result, reduces the throughput deliberately by frequently invoking slow-start congestion control algorithms. Despite the availability of many congestion control mechanisms to address this problem, the conventional TCP continues to suffer from poor performance when deployed in the Vehicular Ad-hoc Network (VANET) environment. Moreover, the way non-safety applications, when pressed into service, will treat the existing delay-sensitive safety messaging applications and the way these two types of applications interact between them are not (well) understood, and therefore, in order for them to coexist, the implication and repercussion need to be examined closely. This is especially important as IEEE 802.11p standards are not designed keeping in view the issues TCP raises in relation to safety messages. This dissertation addresses the issues arising out of this situation and in particular confronts the congestion challenges thrown up in the context of heterogenous communication in VANET environment by proposing an innovative solution with two optimized congestion control algorithms. Extensive simulation studies conducted by the author shows that both these algorithms have improved TCP performance in terms of metrics like Packet Delivery Fraction (PDF), Packet Loss and End-to-End Delay (E2ED), and at the same time they encourage the non-safety TCP application to behave unobtrusively and cooperatively to a large extent with DSRC’s safety applications. The first algorithm, called vScalable-TCP – a modification of the existing TCPScalable variant – introduces a reliable transport protocol suitable for DSRC. In the proposed approach, whenever packets are discarded excessively due to congestion, the slow-start mechanism is purposely suppressed temporarily to avoid further congestion and packet loss. The crucial idea here is how to adjust and regulate the behaviour of vScalable-TCP in a way that the existing safety message flows are least disturbed. The simulation results confirm that the new vScalable-TCP provides better performance for real-time safety applications than TCP-Reno and other TCP variants considered in this thesis in terms of standard performance metrics. The second algorithm, named vLP-TCP – a modification of the existing TCP-LP variant – is designed to test and demonstrate that the strategy developed for vScalable-TCP is also compatible with another congestion control mechanism and achieves the same purpose. This expectation is borne out well by the simulation results. The same slow-start congestion management strategy has been employed but with only a few amendments. This modified algorithm also improves substantially the performance of basic safety management applications. The present work thus clearly confirms that both vScalable-TCP and vLP-TCP algorithms – the prefix ‘v’ to the names standing for ‘vehicular’ – outperform the existing unadorned TCP-Scalable and TCP-LP algorithms, in terms of standard performance metrics, while at the same time behaving in a friendly manner, by way of sharing bandwidth non-intrusively with DSRC safety applications. This paves the way for the smooth and harmonious coexistence of these two broad, clearly incompatible or complementary categories of applications – viz. time-sensitive safety applications and delay-tolerant infotainment applications – by narrowing down their apparent impedance or behavioural mismatch, when they are coerced to go hand in hand in a DSRC environment

Reliability Mechanisms for Controllers in Real-Time Cyber-Physical Systems

Cyber-physical systems (CPSs) are real-world processes that are controlled by computer algorithms. We consider CPSs where a centralized, software-based controller maintains the process in a desired state by exchanging measurements and setpoints with process agents (PAs). As CPSs control processes with low-inertia, e.g., electric grids and autonomous cars, the controller needs to satisfy stringent real-time constraints. However, the controllers are susceptible to delay and crash faults, and the communication network might drop, delay or reorder messages. This degrades the quality of control of the physical process, failure of which can result in damage to life or property. Existing reliability solutions are either not well-suited for real-time CPSs or impose serious restrictions on the controllers. In this thesis, we design, implement and evaluate reliability mechanisms for real-time CPS controllers that require minimal modifications to the controller itself. We begin by abstracting the execution of a CPS using events in the CPS, and the two inherent relations among those events, namely network and computation relations. We use these relations to introduce the intentionality relation that uses these events to capture the state of the physical process. Based on the intentionality relation, we define three correctness properties namely, state safety, optimal selection and consistency, that together provide linearizability (one-copy equivalence) for CPS controllers. We propose intentionality clocks and Quarts, and prove that they provide linearizability. To provide consistency, Quarts ensures agreement among controller replicas, which is typically achieved using consensus. Consensus can add an unbounded-latency overhead. Quarts leverages the properties specific to CPSs to perform agreement using pre-computed priorities among sets of received measurements, resulting in a bounded-latency overhead with high availability. Using simulation, we show that availability of Quarts, with two replicas, is more than an order of magnitude higher than consensus. We also propose Axo, a fault-tolerance protocol that uses active replication to detect and recover faulty replicas, and provide timeliness that requires delayed setpoints be masked from the PAs. We study the effect of delay faults and the impact of fault-tolerance with Axo, by deploying Axo in two real-world CPSs. Then, we realize that the proposed reliability mechanisms also apply to unconventional CPSs such as software defined networking (SDN), where the controlled process is the routing fabric of the network. We show that, in SDN, violating consistency can cause implementation of incorrect routing policies. Thus, we use Quarts and intentionality clocks, to design and implement QCL, a coordination layer for SDN controllers that guarantees control-plane consistency. QCL also drastically reduces the response time of SDN controllers when compared to consensus-based techniques. In the last part of the thesis, we address the problem of reliable communication between the software agents, in a wide-area network that can drop, delay or reorder messages. For this, we propose iPRP, an IP-friendly parallel redundancy protocol for 0 ms repair of packet losses. iPRP requires fail-independent paths for high-reliability. So, we study the fail-independence of Wi-Fi links using real-life measurements, as a first step towards using Wi-Fi for real-time communication in CPSs

On the unsuitability of TCP RTO estimation over bursty error channels

Abstract. This work identifies the presence of long idle times as the main cause for the high performance degradation suffered by TCP over bursty error environments. After a comprehensive and fully experimental analysis, performed over an IEEE 802.11b real platform, it is derived that the traditional computation that TCP uses for the RTO estimation does not behave properly over channels prone to suffer from bursty errors. The authors propose a modification to that algorithm so as to avoid such an undesirable behavio

A distributed intelligent network based on CORBA and SCTP

The telecommunications services marketplace is undergoing radical change due to the rapid convergence and evolution of telecommunications and computing technologies. Traditionally telecommunications service providers’ ability to deliver network services has been through Intelligent Network (IN) platforms. The IN may be characterised as envisioning centralised processing of distributed service requests from a limited number of quasi-proprietary nodes with inflexible connections to the network management system and third party networks. The nodes are inter-linked by the operator’s highly reliable but expensive SS.7 network. To leverage this technology as the core of new multi-media services several key technical challenges must be overcome. These include: integration of the IN with new technologies for service delivery, enhanced integration with network management services, enabling third party service providers and reducing operating costs by using more general-purpose computing and networking equipment. In this thesis we present a general architecture that defines the framework and techniques required to realise an open, flexible, middleware (CORBA)-based distributed intelligent network (DIN). This extensible architecture naturally encapsulates the full range of traditional service network technologies, for example IN (fixed network), GSM-MAP and CAMEL. Fundamental to this architecture are mechanisms for inter-working with the existing IN infrastructure, to enable gradual migration within a domain and inter-working between IN and DIN domains. The DIN architecture compliments current research on third party service provision, service management and integration Internet-based servers. Given the dependence of such a distributed service platform on the transport network that links computational nodes, this thesis also includes a detailed study of the emergent IP-based telecommunications transport protocol of choice, Stream Control Transmission Protocol (SCTP). In order to comply with the rigorous performance constraints of this domain, prototyping, simulation and analytic modelling of the DIN based on SCTP have been carried out. This includes the first detailed analysis of the operation of SCTP congestion controls under a variety of network conditions leading to a number of suggested improvements in the operation of the protocol. Finally we describe a new analytic framework for dimensioning networks with competing multi-homed SCTP flows in a DIN. This framework can be used for any multi-homed SCTP network e.g. one transporting SIP or HTTP