Packet Reordering in Networks with Heavy-Tailed Delays

An important characteristic of any TCP connection is the sequencing of packets within that connection. Out-of sequence packets indicate that the connection suffers from loss, duplication or reordering. It is thus of interest to study the magnitude of out-of sequence packets within Internet TCP connection and to identify their causes. More generally, in many distributed applications (e.g., remote computations, database manipulations, or data transmission over a computer network), information integrity requires that data exchanges between different nodes of a system be performed in a specific order. However, due to random delays over different paths in a system, the packets or updates may arrive at the receiver in a different order than their chronological order. In such a case, a resequencing buffer at the receiver has to store disordered packets temporarily. We analyze both the waiting time of a packet in the resequencing buffer and the size of this resequencing queue. We derive the exact asymptotics for the large deviation of these quantities under heavy-tailed assumptions. In contrast with results obtained for light-tailed distributions, we show that there exists several ``typical paths'' that lead to the large deviation. We derive explicitly these different ``typical paths'' and give heuristic rules for an optimal balancing

A critical look at power law modelling of the Internet

This paper takes a critical look at the usefulness of power law models of the Internet. The twin focuses of the paper are Internet traffic and topology generation. The aim of the paper is twofold. Firstly it summarises the state of the art in power law modelling particularly giving attention to existing open research questions. Secondly it provides insight into the failings of such models and where progress needs to be made for power law research to feed through to actual improvements in network performance.Comment: To appear Computer Communication

Datacenter Traffic Control: Understanding Techniques and Trade-offs

Datacenters provide cost-effective and flexible access to scalable compute and storage resources necessary for today's cloud computing needs. A typical datacenter is made up of thousands of servers connected with a large network and usually managed by one operator. To provide quality access to the variety of applications and services hosted on datacenters and maximize performance, it deems necessary to use datacenter networks effectively and efficiently. Datacenter traffic is often a mix of several classes with different priorities and requirements. This includes user-generated interactive traffic, traffic with deadlines, and long-running traffic. To this end, custom transport protocols and traffic management techniques have been developed to improve datacenter network performance. In this tutorial paper, we review the general architecture of datacenter networks, various topologies proposed for them, their traffic properties, general traffic control challenges in datacenters and general traffic control objectives. The purpose of this paper is to bring out the important characteristics of traffic control in datacenters and not to survey all existing solutions (as it is virtually impossible due to massive body of existing research). We hope to provide readers with a wide range of options and factors while considering a variety of traffic control mechanisms. We discuss various characteristics of datacenter traffic control including management schemes, transmission control, traffic shaping, prioritization, load balancing, multipathing, and traffic scheduling. Next, we point to several open challenges as well as new and interesting networking paradigms. At the end of this paper, we briefly review inter-datacenter networks that connect geographically dispersed datacenters which have been receiving increasing attention recently and pose interesting and novel research problems.Comment: Accepted for Publication in IEEE Communications Surveys and Tutorial

Error Resilient Multipath Video Delivery on Wireless Overlay Networks

Real time applications delivering multimedia data over wireless networks still pose many challenges due to high throughput and stringent delay requirements. Overlay networks with multipath transmission is the promising solution to address the above problems. But in wireless networks the maintenance of overlay networks induce additional overheads affecting the bulky and delay sensitive delivery of multimedia data. To minimize the overheads, this work introduces the Error Compensated Data Distribution Model (ECDD) that aids in reducing end to end delays and overheads arising from packet retransmissions. The ECDD adopts mTreebone algorithm to identify the unstable wireless nodes and construct overlay tree. The overlay tree is further split to support multipath transmissions. A sub packetization mechanism is adopted for multipath video data delivery in the ECDD. A forward error correction mechanism and sub-packet retransmission techniques adopted in ECDD enables to reduce the overhead and end to end delay. The simulation results presented in this paper prove that the ECDD model proposed achieves lower end to end delay and outperforms the existing models in place. Retransmission requests are minimized by about 52.27% and bit errors are reduced by about 23.93% than Sub-Packet based Multipath Load Distribution

Strengthening the Anonymity of Anonymous Communication Systems

In this work, we examine why a popular anonymity network, Tor, is vulnerable to timing side-channel attacks. We explore removing this vulnerability from Tor without sacrificing its low-latency which is important for usability. We find that Tor is vulnerable because inter-packet delays propagate along the network path from the source to the destination. This provides an easily detected signature. We explore techniques for making the timing signature either expensive or impossible to detect. If each packet took a unique, disjoint path from source to destination the inter-packet delay signature would be undetectable. Jitter and latency would change packet arrival orders. This is impractical since the overhead for constructing these circuits would be prohibitive. We scaled this idea back to reflect how the BitTorrent protocol creates a large number of possible paths from a small number of nodes. We form a fully connected network with the source, destination, and a small number of nodes. The number of paths through this network from source to destination grows quickly with the addition of each node. Paths do not have to include every node, so the delay of each path is different. By transmitting consecutive packets on different paths, the network delays will mask the inter-packet delay signature

Performance enhancement of large scale networks with heterogeneous traffic.

Finally, these findings are applied towards improving the performance of the Differentiated Services architecture by developing a new Refined Assured Forwarding framework where heterogeneous traffic flows share the same aggregate class. The new framework requires minimal modification to the existing Diffserv routers. The efficiency of the new architecture in enhancing the performance of Diffserv is demonstrated by simulation results under different traffic scenarios.This dissertation builds on the notion that segregating traffic with disparate characteristics into separate channels generally results in a better performance. Through a quantitative analysis, it precisely defines the number of classes and the allocation of traffic into these classes that will lead to optimal performance from a latency standpoint. Additionally, it weakens the most generally used assumption of exponential or geometric distribution of traffic service time in the integration versus segregation studies to date by including self-similarity in network traffic.The dissertation also develops a pricing model based on resource usage in a system with segregated channels. Based on analytical results, this dissertation proposes a scheme whereby a service provider can develop compensatory and fair prices for customers with varying QoS requirements under a wide variety of ambient traffic scenarios.This dissertation provides novel techniques for improving the Quality of Service by enhancing the performance of queue management in large scale packet switched networks with a high volume of traffic. Networks combine traffic from multiple sources which have disparate characteristics. Multiplexing such heterogeneous traffic usually results in adverse effects on the overall performance of the network