Design and Analysis of RT-Ring: A Protocol for Supporting Real-Time Communications

Distributed applications with quality of service (QoS) requirements are more and more used in several areas (e.g., automated factory networks, embedded systems, conferencing systems). These applications produce a type of traffic with hard timing requirements, i.e., transmissions must be completed within specified deadlines. To handle these transmissions, the communication system must use real-time protocols to provide a communication service that is able to satisfy the QoS requirements of the distributed applications. In this paper, we propose a new real-time protocol, called RT-Ring, able to support transmissions of both real-time and generic traffic over a ring network. RT-Ring provides both network guarantees and high network resource utilization, while ensuring the compatibility with the emerging differentiated service architectures. Network guarantees are fully proved and high network utilization is highlighted by a comparative study with the FDDI protocol. This comparison shows that RT-Ring network capacities are greater than the corresponding FDDI capacities. In fact, by assuming the FDDI frames with a length equal to the RT-Ring slot size and by using the same traffic load we show that the capacities of FDDI are equal to the lower bound capacities of RT-Ring. Index Terms Real-time protocol, quality of service (QoS) traffic, worst case analysis

Fairness in a data center

Existing data centers utilize several networking technologies in order to handle the performance requirements of different workloads. Maintaining diverse networking technologies increases complexity and is not cost effective. This results in the current trend to converge all traffic into a single networking fabric. Ethernet is both cost-effective and ubiquitous, and as such it has been chosen as the technology of choice for the converged fabric. However, traditional Ethernet does not satisfy the needs of all traffic workloads, for the most part, due to its lossy nature and, therefore, has to be enhanced to allow for full convergence. The resulting technology, Data Center Bridging (DCB), is a new set of standards defined by the IEEE to make Ethernet lossless even in the presence of congestion. As with any new networking technology, it is critical to analyze how the different protocols within DCB interact with each other as well as how each protocol interacts with existing technologies in other layers of the protocol stack. This dissertation presents two novel schemes that address critical issues in DCB networks: fairness with respect to packet lengths and fairness with respect to flow control and bandwidth utilization. The Deficit Round Robin with Adaptive Weight Control (DRR-AWC) algorithm actively monitors the incoming streams and adjusts the scheduling weights of the outbound port. The algorithm was implemented on a real DCB switch and shown to increase fairness for traffic consisting of mixed-length packets. Targeted Priority-based Flow Control (TPFC) provides a hop-by-hop flow control mechanism that restricts the flow of aggressor streams while allowing victim streams to continue unimpeded. Two variants of the targeting mechanism within TPFC are presented and their performance evaluated through simulation

Novel algorithms for fair bandwidth sharing on counter rotating rings

Rings are often preferred technology for networks as ring networks can virtually create fully connected mesh networks efficiently and they are also easy to manage. However, providing fair service to all the stations on the ring is not always easy to achieve. In order to capitalize on the advantages of ring networks, new buffer insertion techniques, such as Spatial Reuse Protocol (SRP), were introduced in early 2000s. As a result, a new standard known as IEEE 802.17 Resilient Packet Ring was defined in 2004 by the IEEE Resilient Packet Ring (RPR) Working Group. Since then two addenda have been introduced; namely, IEEE 802.17a and IEEE 802.17b in 2006 and 2010, respectively. During this standardization process, weighted fairness and queue management schemes were proposed to be used in the standard. As shown in this dissertation, these schemes can be applied to solve the fairness issues noted widely in the research community as radical changes are not practical to introduce within the context of a standard. In this dissertation, the weighted fairness aspects of IEEE 802.17 RPR (in the aggressive mode of operation) are studied; various properties are demonstrated and observed via network simulations, and additional improvements are suggested. These aspects have not been well studied until now, and can be used to alleviate some of the issues observed in the fairness algorithm under some scenarios. Also, this dissertation focuses on the RPR Medium Access Control (MAC) Client implementation of the IEEE 802.17 RPR MAC in the aggressive mode of operation and introduces a new active queue management scheme for ring networks that achieves higher overall utilization of the ring bandwidth with simpler and less expensive implementation than the generic implementation provided in the standard. The two schemes introduced in this dissertation provide performance comparable to the per destination queuing implementation, which yields the best achievable performance at the expense of the cost of implementation. In addition, till now the requirements for sizing secondary transit queue of IEEE 802.17 RPR stations (in the aggressive mode of operation) have not been properly investigated. The analysis and suggested improvements presented in this dissertation are then supported by performance evaluation results and theoretical calculations. Last, but not least, the impact of using different capacity links on the same ring has not been investigated before from the ring utilization and fairness points of view. This dissertation also investigates utilizing different capacity links in RPR and proposes a mechanism to support the same

Measurement Based Reconfigurations in Optical Ring Metro Networks

Single-hop wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) optical ring networks operating in packet mode are one of themost promising architectures for the design of innovative metropolitan network (metro) architectures. They permit a cost-effective design, with a good combination of optical and electronic technologies, while supporting features like restoration and reconfiguration that are essential in any metro scenario. In this article, we address the tunability requirements that lead to an effective resource usage and permit reconfiguration in optical WDM metros.We introduce reconfiguration algorithms that, on the basis of traffic measurements, adapt the network configuration to traffic demands to optimize performance. Using a specific network architecture as a reference case, the paper aims at the broader goal of showing which are the advantages fostered by innovative network designs exploiting the features of optical technologies

Medium access control mechanisms for high speed metropolitan area networks

In this dissertation novel Medium Access Control mechanisms for High Speed Metropolitan Area networks are proposed and their performance is investigated under the presence of single and multiple priority classes of traffic. The proposed mechanisms are based on the Distributed Queue Dual Bus network, which has been adopted by the IEEE standardization committee as the 802.6 standard for Metropolitan Area Networks, and address most of its performance limitations. First, the Rotating Slot Generator scheme is introduced which uses the looped bus architecture that has been proposed for the 802.6 network. According to this scheme the responsibility for generating slots moves periodically from station to station around the loop. In this way, the positions of the stations relative to the slot generator change continuously, and therefore, there are no favorable locations on the busses. Then, two variations of a new bandwidth balancing mechanism, the NSW_BWB and ITU_NSW are introduced. Their main advantage is that their operation does not require the wastage of channel slots and for this reason they can converge very fast to the steady state, where the fair bandwidth allocation is achieved. Their performance and their ability to support multiple priority classes of traffic are thoroughly investigated. Analytic estimates for the stations\u27 throughputs and average segment delays are provided. Moreover, a novel, very effective priority mechanism is introduced which can guarantee almost immediate access for high priority traffic, regardless of the presence of lower priority traffic. Its performance is thoroughly investigated and its ability to support real time traffic, such as voice and video, is demonstrated. Finally, the performance under the presence of erasure nodes of the various mechanisms that have been proposed in this dissertation is examined and compared to the corresponding performance of the most prominent existing mechanisms

High speed protocols for dual bus and dual ring network architectures

In this dissertation, two channel access mechanisms providing fair and bandwidth efficient transmission on dual bus and dual ring networks with high bandwidth-latency product are proposed. In addition, two effective priority mechanisms are introduced to meet the throughput and delay requirements of the diverse arrays of applications that future high speed networks must support. For dual bus architectures, the Buffer Insertion Bandwidth Balancing (BI_BWB) mechanism and the Preemptive priority Bandwidth Balancing (P_BI_BWB) mechanism are proposed. BI_BWB can significantly improve the delay performance of remote stations. It achieves that by providing each station with a shift register into which the station can temporarily store the upstream stations\u27 transmitted packets and replace these packets with its own transmissions. P_BI_BWB, an enhancement of BI_BWB, is designed to introduce effective preemptive priorities. This mechanism eliminates the effect of low priority on high priority by buffering the low priority traffic into a shift register until the transmission of the high priority traffic is complete. For dual ring architectures, the Fair Bandwidth Allocation Mechanism (FBAM) and the Effective Priority Bandwidth Balancing (EP_BWB) mechanism are introduced. FBAM allows stations to reserve channel bandwidth on a continuous basis rather than wait until bandwidth starvation is observed. Consequently, FBAM does not have to deal with the difficult issue of identifying starvation, a serious drawback of other access mechanisms such as the Local and Global Fairness Algorithms (LFA and GFA, respectively). In addition, its operation requires a significantly smaller number of control bits in the access control field of the slot and its performance is less sensitive to system parameters. Moreover, FBAM demonstrates Max-Min flow control properties with respect to the allocation of bandwidth among competing traffic streams, which is a significant advantage of FBAM over all the previously proposed channel access mechanisms. EP_BWB, an enhancement of FBAM to support preemptive priorities, minimizes the effect of low priority on high priority and supports delay-sensitive traffic by enabling higher priority classes to preempt the transmissions of lower priority classes. Finally, the great potential of EP_BWB to support the interconnection of base stations on a distributed control wireless PCN carrying voice and data traffic is demonstrated

Robustness of bus overlays in optical networks

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2002.Includes bibliographical references (p. 53-56).This electronic version was submitted by the student author. The certified thesis is available in the Institute Archives and Special Collections.Local area networks (LANs) nowadays use optical fiber as the medium of communication. This fiber is used to connect a collection of electro-optic nodes which form network clouds. A network cloud is a distribution network that connects several external nodes to the backbone, and often takes the form of a star or tree. Optical stars and trees have expensive and inefficient recovery schemes, and as a result, are not attractive options when designing networks. In order to solve this problem, we introduce a virtual topology that makes use of the robustness that is inherently present in a metropolitan area network (MAN) or wide area network (WAN) (long haul network). The virtual topology uses a folded bus scheme and includes some of the elements of the real topology (architecture). By optically bypassing some of the router/switch nodes in the physical architecture, the virtual topology yields better recovery performance and more efficient systems (with respect to cost related to bandwidth and recoverability). We present a bus overlay which uses simple access nodes and is robust to single failures. Our architecture allows the use of existing optical backbone infrastructure. We consider a linear folded bus architecture and introduce a T-shaped folded bus. Although buses are generally not able to recover from failures, we propose a loopback approach. Our approach allows optical bypass of some routers during normal operation, thus reducing the load on routers, but makes use of routers in case of failures. We analyze the behavior of our linear and T-shaped systems under average use and failure conditions. We show that certain simple characteristics of the traffic matrix give meaningful performance characterization. We show that our architecture provides solutions which limit loads on the router.by Ari Levon Libarikian.S.M

Congestion control in resilient packet ring networks

The Resilient Packet Ring (RPR) is a new metro technology; RPR shares SONET\u27s ability in providing fast recovery from link and node failures as well as inherits the cost and simplicity of Ethernet. RPR, like SONET/SDH, is a ring based architecture consisting of two optical rotating rings (uni-directional). In RPR, packets are removed from the ring at the destination so that different segments of the ring can be used at the same time for different flows; as a result, the spatial reuse feature is achieved. Enabling the spatial reuse feature introduces the challenge of guaranteeing fairness among the nodes sharing the same link. The RPR fairness algorithm is comparatively simple, but it poses some critical limitations. One of the major problems is that the amount of bandwidth allocated by the algorithm oscillates severely under unbalanced traffic scenarios. These oscillations are a barrier to achieving spatial reuse and high bandwidth utilization. Moreover, the current RPR standard uses a single FIFO for each class at the ingress point, thus resulting in the head of line blocking problem. On the other hand, RPR uses the shortest path to route the traffic in the dual ring which is inefficient and unfair. In this dissertation, the performance of the existing fairness algorithms and their limitations was investigated. Two bandwidth allocation algorithms were proposed to address the fairness issue. Both algorithms were demonstrated analytically and through simulations were able to achieve fairness and maximize the ring utilization. The Distributed Bandwidth Allocation (DBA) and the Adaptive Bandwidth Allocation (ABA) do not need to maintain information about each node. Instead, they use the local information which makes them scalable for a ring with any number of nodes. The Simple Scheduling Algorithm (SSA) was proposed to avoid the head of line blocking and to maximize the ring utilization at a very low complexity. The SSA algorithm was shown analytically and through simulations to be optimal where the flows achieve their max-mm fair rates at a very low computational complexity. Also, the weighted routing algorithm was proposed to maximize the ring utilization by enabling the RPR nodes to transmit in both rings in a weighted manner. The routing algorithm was demonstrated analytically and through simulations was able to maximize the ring utilization

Findings about the two-state BMMPP for modeling point processes in reliability and queueing systems

The Batch Markov Modulated Poisson Process (BMMPP) is a subclass of the versatile Batch Markovian Arrival process (BMAP) which have been widely used for the modeling of dependent and correlated simultaneous events (as arrivals, failures or risk events, real-time multimedia communications). Both theoretical and applied aspects are examined in this paper. On one hand, the identifiability of the stationary BMMPP2(K) is proven, where K is the maximum batch size. This is a powerful result when inferential tasks related to real data sets are carried out. On the other hand, some findings concerning the correlation and autocorrelation structures are provided.The first and second authors acknowledge financial support from the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness, research project ECO2015-66593-P. The Third author acknowledge financial support from the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness, research project MTM2015-65915-R; and also from Junta de Andalucía, and BBVA Fundation, research project P11- FQM-7603 and FQM-32