Towards a new generation of transport services adapted to multimedia application

Une connexion d'ordre et de fiabilité partiels (POC, partial order connection) est une connexion de transport autorisée à perdre certains objets mais également à les délivrer dans un ordre éventuellement différent de celui d'émission. L'approche POC établit un lien conceptuel entre les protocoles sans connexion au mieux et les protocoles fiables avec connexion. Le concept de POC est motivé par le fait que dans les réseaux hétérogènes sans connexion tels qu'Internet, les paquets transmis sont susceptibles de se perdre et d'arriver en désordre, entraînant alors une réduction des performances des protocoles usuels. De plus, on montre qu'un protocole associé au transport d'un flux multimédia permet une réduction très sensible de l'utilisation des ressources de communication et de mémorisation ainsi qu'une diminution du temps de transit moyen. Dans cet article, une extension temporelle de POC, nommée TPOC (POC temporisé), est introduite. Elle constitue un cadre conceptuel permettant la prise en compte des exigences de qualité de service des applications multimédias réparties. Une architecture offrant un service TPOC est également introduite et évaluée dans le cadre du transport de vidéo MPEG. Il est ainsi démontré que les connexions POC comblent, non seulement le fossé conceptuel entre les protocoles sans connexion et avec connexion, mais aussi qu'ils surpassent les performances des ces derniers lorsque des données multimédias (telles que la vidéo MPEG) sont transportées

Transport of video over partial order connections

A Partial Order and partial reliable Connection (POC) is an end-to-end transport connection authorized to deliver objects in an order that can differ from the transmitted one. Such a connection is also authorized to lose some objects. The POC concept is motivated by the fact that heterogeneous best-effort networks such as Internet are plagued by unordered delivery of packets and losses, which tax the performances of current applications and protocols. It has been shown, in several research works, that out of order delivery is able to alleviate (with respect to CO service) the use of end systems’ communication resources. In this paper, the efficiency of out-of-sequence delivery on MPEG video streams processing is studied. Firstly, the transport constraints (in terms of order and reliability) that can be relaxed by MPEG video decoders, for improving video transport, are detailed. Then, we analyze the performance gain induced by this approach in terms of blocking times and recovered errors. We demonstrate that POC connections fill not only the conceptual gap between TCP and UDP but also provide real performance improvements for the transport of multimedia streams such MPEG video

The QUIC Fix for Optimal Video Streaming

Within a few years of its introduction, QUIC has gained traction: a significant chunk of traffic is now delivered over QUIC. The networking community is actively engaged in debating the fairness, performance, and applicability of QUIC for various use cases, but these debates are centered around a narrow, common theme: how does the new reliable transport built on top of UDP fare in different scenarios? Support for unreliable delivery in QUIC remains largely unexplored. The option for delivering content unreliably, as in a best-effort model, deserves the QUIC designers' and community's attention. We propose extending QUIC to support unreliable streams and present a simple approach for implementation. We discuss a simple use case of video streaming---an application that dominates the overall Internet traffic---that can leverage the unreliable streams and potentially bring immense benefits to network operators and content providers. To this end, we present a prototype implementation that, by using both the reliable and unreliable streams in QUIC, outperforms both TCP and QUIC in our evaluations.Comment: Published to ACM CoNEXT Workshop on the Evolution, Performance, and Interoperability of QUIC (EPIQ

Supplier Selection Problem under Z-information

AbstractSupplier selection problem is a very important element of Supply Chain Management systems. The existing works are devoted to solving this problem under deterministic, stochastic, interval-based and fuzzy information. Unfortunately, up today no systematic research on supplier selection under partial reliability of information is proposed. In this paper we suggest new method for solving supplier selection problem under fuzzy and partially reliable information formalized by using Z-numbers. The method is based on determination of Z-number valued ideal and negative ideal solutions. A numerical example is provided to illustrate validity of the proposed approach to supplier selection problem

A Modified Uncertainty Measure of Z-numbers

The Z-number is a more adequate construct for describing real-life information. While considering the uncertainty of the information, it also models the partial reliability of the information. It is a combination of probabilistric restriction and possibilistric restriction. In this paper, we modified the uncertainty measurement of the discrete Z-number and proposed the uncertainty measurement of the continuous Z-number. Some numerical examples are used to illustrate the calculation processes and advantages of the proposed method. An application of journey vehicle selection shows the effectiveness of the proposed uncertainty measurement in determining the weights of criteria

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

eCMT-SCTP: Improving Performance of Multipath SCTP with Erasure Coding Over Lossy Links

Performance of transport protocols on lossy links is a well-researched topic, however there are only a few proposals making use of the opportunities of erasure coding within the multipath transport protocol context. In this paper, we investigate performance improvements of multipath CMT-SCTP with the novel integration of the on-the-fly erasure code within congestion control and reliability mechanisms. Our contributions include: integration of transport protocol and erasure codes with regards to congestion control; proposal for a variable retransmission delay parameter (aRTX) adjustment; performance evaluation of CMT-SCTP with erasure coding with simulations. We have implemented the explicit congestion notification (ECN) and erasure coding schemes in NS-2, evaluated and demonstrated results of improvement both for application goodput and decline of spurious retransmission. Our results show that we can achieve from 10% to 80% improvements in goodput under lossy network conditions without a significant penalty and minimal overhead due to the encoding-decoding process

Building self-optimized communication systems based on applicative cross-layer information

This article proposes the Implicit Packet Meta Header(IPMH) as a standard method to compute and represent common QoS properties of the Application Data Units (ADU) of multimedia streams using legacy and proprietary streams’ headers (e.g. Real-time Transport Protocol headers). The use of IPMH by mechanisms located at different layers of the communication architecture will allow implementing fine per-packet selfoptimization of communication services regarding the actual application requirements. A case study showing how IPMH is used by error control mechanisms in the context of wireless networks is presented in order to demonstrate the feasibility and advantages of this approach

Unicast UDP Usage Guidelines for Application Designers

Publisher PD

Reinterpreting the transport protocol stack to embrace ossification

Ubiquitous deployment of middleboxes has resulted in ossification of the transport layer, with TCP and UDP becoming part of the narrow waist of the Internet. This is a necessary stage in the evolution of the network, caused by its progression from research, to production, to increasingly critical infrastructure. New transport layer protocols will be needed in future, but since we are working with essential infrastructure, we cannot expect to have scope to make wholesale rapid changes. Future development must be done using the existing protocols as substrates, always maintaining on-the-wire compatibility. To advance, we must embrace the ossification of the network, and learn to reinterpret and extend the existing protocols