Protecting video service quality in multimedia access networks through PCN

The growing popularity of video-based services and their corresponding unpredictable bursty behavior makes the design of an admission control system an important research challenge. The pre-congestion notification (PCN) mechanism is a measurement-based approach, recently standardized by the IETF, optimized toward the admission of inelastic flows, where the number of flows is sufficiently large that individual bursts of flows can be compensated by silence periods of others. In this article, we discuss the implications of applying PCN to protect video services, which have less predictable behavior. Several algorithms for protecting video services in multimedia access networks are described. Through performance evaluation, we show the impact of these algorithms on the network utilization and video quality, and present guidelines on how to configure a PCN system

Joint in-network video rate adaptation and measurement-based admission control: algorithm design and evaluation

The important new revenue opportunities that multimedia services offer to network and service providers come with important management challenges. For providers, it is important to control the video quality that is offered and perceived by the user, typically known as the quality of experience (QoE). Both admission control and scalable video coding techniques can control the QoE by blocking connections or adapting the video rate but influence each other's performance. In this article, we propose an in-network video rate adaptation mechanism that enables a provider to define a policy on how the video rate adaptation should be performed to maximize the provider's objective (e.g., a maximization of revenue or QoE). We discuss the need for a close interaction of the video rate adaptation algorithm with a measurement based admission control system, allowing to effectively orchestrate both algorithms and timely switch from video rate adaptation to the blocking of connections. We propose two different rate adaptation decision algorithms that calculate which videos need to be adapted: an optimal one in terms of the provider's policy and a heuristic based on the utility of each connection. Through an extensive performance evaluation, we show the impact of both algorithms on the rate adaptation, network utilisation and the stability of the video rate adaptation. We show that both algorithms outperform other configurations with at least 10 %. Moreover, we show that the proposed heuristic is about 500 times faster than the optimal algorithm and experiences only a performance drop of approximately 2 %, given the investigated video delivery scenario

Pre-Congestion Notification (PCN) Architecture

This document describes a general architecture for flow admission and termination based on pre-congestion information in order to protect the quality of service of established, inelastic flows within a single Diffserv domain.\u

Pre-Congestion Notification Encoding Comparison

DiffServ mechanisms have been developed to support Quality of Service (QoS). However, the level of assurance that can be provided with DiffServ without substantial over-provisioning is limited. Pre-Congestion Notification (PCN) investigates the use of per-flow admission control to provide the required service guarantees for the admitted traffic. While admission control will protect the QoS under\ud normal operating conditions, an additional flow termination mechanism is necessary in the times of heavy congestion (e.g. caused by route changes due to link or node failure).\ud Encoding and their transport are required to carry the congestion and pre-congestion information from the congestion and pre-congestion points to the decision points. This document provides a survey of\ud several encoding methods, using comparisons amongst them as a way to explain their strengths and weaknesses.\u

PCN based admission control for autonomic video quality differentiation: design and evaluation

The popularity of multimedia services has introduced important new challenges for broadband access network management. As these services are very prone to network anomalies such as packet loss and jitter, accurate admission control mechanisms are needed to avoid congestion. Traditionally, centralized admission control mechanisms often underperform in combination with multimedia services, as they fail to effectively characterize the amount of needed resources. Recently, measurement based admission control mechanisms have been proposed such as the IETF Pre-Congestion Notification (PCN) mechanism, where the network load is measured at each intermediate node and signaled to the edge, where the admittance decision takes place. In this article, we design a PCN based admission control mechanism, optimized for protecting bursty traffic such as video services, which is currently not studied in the PCN working group. We evaluated and identified the effect of PCN's configuration in protecting bursty traffic. The proposed admission control mechanism features three main improvements to the original PCN mechanism: first, it uses a new measurement algorithm, which is easier to configure for bursty traffic. Second, it allows to automatically adapt PCN's configuration based on the traffic characteristics of the current sessions. Third, it introduces the differentiation between video quality levels to achieve an admission decision per video quality level of each request. The mechanism has been extensively evaluated in a packet switched simulation environment, which shows that the novel admission control mechanism is able to protec

An autonomic PCN based admission control mechanism for video services in access networks

The introduction of new added value services such as IPTV has introduced great challenges for today's broadband DSL access networks as these services have stringent quality demands. In an attempt to protect the quality delivery of existing sessions, operators employ admission control mechanisms that limit the amount of sessions transmitted in the network. Current admission control mechanisms require a traffic specification of each stream, in order to know beforehand how many resources need to be reserved. For variable bit rate videos, which are bursty of nature, resources are reserved using the peak rate of the video. This leads to under-utilisation of the network as the amount of resources needed is over-dimensioned. We propose an autonomic measurement based admission control algorithm, optimised for the protection of video services in multimedia access networks. The algorithm is based on the IETF precongestion notification (PCN) mechanism and autonomically adjusts its parameters to the traffic characterisation of the video. The performance of this mechanism has been extensively evaluated in a packet based network simulation environment. Tests show that the autonomic nature of the algorithm leads to a better utilisation of the network while still avoiding any congestion in the network

A Survey of PCN-Based Admission Control and Flow Termination

Pre-congestion notification (PCN) provides feedback\ud about load conditions in a network to its boundary nodes. The PCN working group of the IETF discusses the use of PCN to implement admission control (AC) and flow termination (FT) for prioritized realtime traffic in a DiffServ domain. Admission control (AC) is a well-known flow control function that blocks admission requests of new flows when they need to be carried over a link whose admitted PCN rate already exceeds an admissible rate. Flow termination (FT) is a new flow control function that terminates some already admitted flows when they are carried over a link whose admitted PCN rate exceeds a supportable rate. The latter condition can occur in spite of AC, e.g., when traffic is rerouted due to network failures.\ud This survey gives an introduction to PCN and is a primer for\ud this new technology. It presents and discusses the multitude of architectural design options in an early stage of the standardization process in a comprehensive and streamlined way before only a subset of them is standardized by the IETF. It brings PCN from the IETF to the research community and serves as historical record

Flow termination signaling in the centralized pre-congestion notification architecture

Pre-congestion notification (PCN) protects inelastic traffic by using feedback on network link loads on and acting upon this accordingly. These actions comprise to admission control and termination of flows. Two PCN architectures have been defined by IETF: the centralized and decentralized PCN architecture. The decentralized PCN architecture has received much attention in the literature whereas the centralized PCN architecture has not. In the decentralized architecture, feedback is sent from the egress nodes to ingress nodes, which then take and apply decisions regarding admission of new flows and/or termination of ongoing flows. Signaling occurs only between ingress and egress nodes. In the centralized architecture these decisions are made at a central node, which requires proper signaling for action and information exchange between the central node and the egress and ingress nodes. This signaling has been suggested by other authors, but is not fully defined yet. Our contribution is twofold. We define signaling in the centralized PCN architecture focussing on flow termination, which completes the definition of the signaling in the centralized PCN architecture. Secondly, we run extensive simulations showing that the proposed signaling works well and that the performances of the centralized PCN and the decentralized PCN architectures are similar. Hence, it is expected that results from existing research on the effectiveness of decentralized PCN are also valid when the centralized PCN architecture is used