1,039 research outputs found
Resource virtualisation of network routers
There is now considerable interest in applications that transport time-sensitive data across the best-effort Internet. We present a novel network router architecture, which has the potential to improve the Quality of Service guarantees provided to such flows. This router architecture makes use of virtual machine techniques, to assign an individual virtual routelet to each network flow requiring QoS guarantees. We describe a prototype of this virtual routelet architecture, and evaluate its effectiveness. Experimental results of the performance and flow partitioning of this prototype, compared with a standard software router, suggest promise in the virtual routelet architecture
SQUASH: Simple QoS-Aware High-Performance Memory Scheduler for Heterogeneous Systems with Hardware Accelerators
Modern SoCs integrate multiple CPU cores and Hardware Accelerators (HWAs)
that share the same main memory system, causing interference among memory
requests from different agents. The result of this interference, if not
controlled well, is missed deadlines for HWAs and low CPU performance.
State-of-the-art mechanisms designed for CPU-GPU systems strive to meet a
target frame rate for GPUs by prioritizing the GPU close to the time when it
has to complete a frame. We observe two major problems when such an approach is
adapted to a heterogeneous CPU-HWA system. First, HWAs miss deadlines because
they are prioritized only close to their deadlines. Second, such an approach
does not consider the diverse memory access characteristics of different
applications running on CPUs and HWAs, leading to low performance for
latency-sensitive CPU applications and deadline misses for some HWAs, including
GPUs.
In this paper, we propose a Simple Quality of service Aware memory Scheduler
for Heterogeneous systems (SQUASH), that overcomes these problems using three
key ideas, with the goal of meeting deadlines of HWAs while providing high CPU
performance. First, SQUASH prioritizes a HWA when it is not on track to meet
its deadline any time during a deadline period. Second, SQUASH prioritizes HWAs
over memory-intensive CPU applications based on the observation that the
performance of memory-intensive applications is not sensitive to memory
latency. Third, SQUASH treats short-deadline HWAs differently as they are more
likely to miss their deadlines and schedules their requests based on worst-case
memory access time estimates.
Extensive evaluations across a wide variety of different workloads and
systems show that SQUASH achieves significantly better CPU performance than the
best previous scheduler while always meeting the deadlines for all HWAs,
including GPUs, thereby largely improving frame rates
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Multimedia delivery in the future internet
The term âNetworked Mediaâ implies that all kinds of media including text, image, 3D graphics, audio
and video are produced, distributed, shared, managed and consumed on-line through various networks,
like the Internet, Fiber, WiFi, WiMAX, GPRS, 3G and so on, in a convergent manner [1]. This white
paper is the contribution of the Media Delivery Platform (MDP) cluster and aims to cover the Networked
challenges of the Networked Media in the transition to the Future of the Internet.
Internet has evolved and changed the way we work and live. End users of the Internet have been confronted
with a bewildering range of media, services and applications and of technological innovations concerning
media formats, wireless networks, terminal types and capabilities. And there is little evidence that the pace
of this innovation is slowing. Today, over one billion of users access the Internet on regular basis, more
than 100 million users have downloaded at least one (multi)media file and over 47 millions of them do so
regularly, searching in more than 160 Exabytes1 of content. In the near future these numbers are expected
to exponentially rise. It is expected that the Internet content will be increased by at least a factor of 6, rising
to more than 990 Exabytes before 2012, fuelled mainly by the users themselves. Moreover, it is envisaged
that in a near- to mid-term future, the Internet will provide the means to share and distribute (new)
multimedia content and services with superior quality and striking flexibility, in a trusted and personalized
way, improving citizensâ quality of life, working conditions, edutainment and safety.
In this evolving environment, new transport protocols, new multimedia encoding schemes, cross-layer inthe
network adaptation, machine-to-machine communication (including RFIDs), rich 3D content as well as
community networks and the use of peer-to-peer (P2P) overlays are expected to generate new models of
interaction and cooperation, and be able to support enhanced perceived quality-of-experience (PQoE) and
innovative applications âon the moveâ, like virtual collaboration environments, personalised services/
media, virtual sport groups, on-line gaming, edutainment. In this context, the interaction with content
combined with interactive/multimedia search capabilities across distributed repositories, opportunistic P2P
networks and the dynamic adaptation to the characteristics of diverse mobile terminals are expected to
contribute towards such a vision.
Based on work that has taken place in a number of EC co-funded projects, in Framework Program 6 (FP6)
and Framework Program 7 (FP7), a group of experts and technology visionaries have voluntarily
contributed in this white paper aiming to describe the status, the state-of-the art, the challenges and the way
ahead in the area of Content Aware media delivery platforms
Content-Aware Multimedia Communications
The demands for fast, economic and reliable dissemination of multimedia
information are steadily growing within our society. While people and
economy increasingly rely on communication technologies, engineers still
struggle with their growing complexity.
Complexity in multimedia communication originates from several sources. The
most prominent is the unreliability of packet networks like the Internet.
Recent advances in scheduling and error control mechanisms for streaming
protocols have shown that the quality and robustness of multimedia delivery
can be improved significantly when protocols are aware of the content they
deliver. However, the proposed mechanisms require close cooperation between
transport systems and application layers which increases the overall system
complexity. Current approaches also require expensive metrics and focus on
special encoding formats only. A general and efficient model is missing so
far.
This thesis presents efficient and format-independent solutions to support
cross-layer coordination in system architectures. In particular, the first
contribution of this work is a generic dependency model that enables
transport layers to access content-specific properties of media streams,
such as dependencies between data units and their importance. The second
contribution is the design of a programming model for streaming
communication and its implementation as a middleware architecture. The
programming model hides the complexity of protocol stacks behind simple
programming abstractions, but exposes cross-layer control and monitoring
options to application programmers. For example, our interfaces allow
programmers to choose appropriate failure semantics at design time while
they can refine error protection and visibility of low-level errors at
run-time.
Based on some examples we show how our middleware simplifies the
integration of stream-based communication into large-scale application
architectures. An important result of this work is that despite cross-layer
cooperation, neither application nor transport protocol designers
experience an increase in complexity. Application programmers can even
reuse existing streaming protocols which effectively increases system
robustness.Der Bedarf unsere Gesellschaft nach kostengĂŒnstiger und
zuverlÀssiger
Kommunikation wÀchst stetig. WÀhrend wir uns selbst immer mehr von modernen
Kommunikationstechnologien abhĂ€ngig machen, mĂŒssen die Ingenieure dieser
Technologien sowohl den Bedarf nach schneller EinfĂŒhrung neuer Produkte
befriedigen als auch die wachsende KomplexitÀt der Systeme beherrschen.
Gerade die Ăbertragung multimedialer Inhalte wie Video und Audiodaten ist
nicht trivial. Einer der prominentesten GrĂŒnde dafĂŒr ist die
UnzuverlÀssigkeit heutiger Netzwerke, wie z.B.~dem Internet. Paketverluste
und schwankende Laufzeiten können die DarstellungsqualitÀt massiv
beeintrĂ€chtigen. Wie jĂŒngste Entwicklungen im Bereich der
Streaming-Protokolle zeigen, sind jedoch QualitÀt und Robustheit der
Ăbertragung effizient kontrollierbar, wenn Streamingprotokolle
Informationen ĂŒber den Inhalt der transportierten Daten ausnutzen.
Existierende AnsÀtze, die den Inhalt von Multimediadatenströmen
beschreiben, sind allerdings meist auf einzelne Kompressionsverfahren
spezialisiert und verwenden berechnungsintensive Metriken. Das reduziert
ihren praktischen Nutzen deutlich. AuĂerdem erfordert der
Informationsaustausch eine enge Kooperation zwischen Applikationen und
Transportschichten. Da allerdings die Schnittstellen aktueller
Systemarchitekturen nicht darauf vorbereitet sind, mĂŒssen entweder die
Schnittstellen erweitert oder alternative Architekturkonzepte geschaffen
werden. Die Gefahr beider Varianten ist jedoch, dass sich die KomplexitÀt
eines Systems dadurch weiter erhöhen kann.
Das zentrale Ziel dieser Dissertation ist es deshalb,
schichtenĂŒbergreifende Koordination bei gleichzeitiger Reduzierung der
KomplexitÀt zu erreichen. Hier leistet die Arbeit zwei BetrÀge zum
aktuellen Stand der Forschung. Erstens definiert sie ein universelles
Modell zur Beschreibung von Inhaltsattributen, wie Wichtigkeiten und
AbhÀngigkeitsbeziehungen innerhalb eines Datenstroms. Transportschichten
können dieses Wissen zur effizienten Fehlerkontrolle verwenden. Zweitens
beschreibt die Arbeit das Noja Programmiermodell fĂŒr multimediale
Middleware. Noja definiert Abstraktionen zur Ăbertragung und Kontrolle
multimedialer Ströme, die die Koordination von Streamingprotokollen mit
Applikationen ermöglichen. Zum Beispiel können Programmierer geeignete
Fehlersemantiken und Kommunikationstopologien auswÀhlen und den konkreten
Fehlerschutz dann zur Laufzeit verfeinern und kontrolliere
Optimized traffic scheduling and routing in smart home networks
Home networks are evolving rapidly to include heterogeneous physical access and a large number of smart devices that generate different types of traffic with different distributions and different Quality of Service (QoS) requirements. Due to their particular architectures, which are very dense and very dynamic, the traditional one-pair-node shortest path solution is no longer efficient to handle inter-smart home networks (inter-SHNs) routing constraints such as delay, packet loss, and bandwidth in all-pair node heterogenous links. In addition, Current QoS-aware scheduling methods consider only the conventional priority metrics based on the IP Type of Service (ToS) field to make decisions for bandwidth allocation. Such priority based scheduling methods are not optimal to provide both QoS and Quality of Experience (QoE), especially for smart home applications, since higher priority traffic does not necessarily require higher stringent delay than lower-priority traffic. Moreover, current QoS-aware scheduling methods in the intra-smart home network (intra-SHN) do not consider concurrent traffic caused by the fluctuation of intra-SH network traffic distributions. Thus, the goal of this dissertation is to build an efficient heterogenous multi-constrained routing mechanism and an optimized traffic scheduling tool in order to maintain a cost-effective communication between all wired-wireless connected devices in inter-SHNs and to effectively process concurrent and non-concurrent traffic in intra-SHN. This will help Internet service providers (ISPs) and home user to enhance the overall QoS and QoE of their applications while maintaining a relevant communication in both inter-SHNs and intra-SHN.
In order to meet this goal, three key issues are required to be addressed in our framework and are summarized as follows: i) how to build a cost-effective routing mechanism in heterogonous inter-SHNs ? ii) how to efficiently schedule the multi-sourced intra-SHN traffic based on both QoS and QoE ? and iii) how to design an optimized queuing model for intra-SHN concurrent traffics while considering their QoS requirements?
As part of our contributions to solve the first problem highlighted above, we present an analytical framework for dynamically optimizing data flows in inter-SHNs using Software-defined networking (SDN). We formulate a QoS-based routing optimization problem as a constrained shortest path problem and then propose an optimized solution (QASDN) to determine minimal cost between all pairs of nodes in the network taking into account the different types of physical accesses and the network utilization patterns.
To address the second issue and to solve the gaps between QoS and QoE, we propose a new queuing model for QoS-level Pair traffic with mixed arrival distributions in Smart Home network (QP-SH) to make a dynamic QoS-aware scheduling decision meeting delay requirements of all traffic while preserving their degrees of criticality. A new metric combining the ToS field and the maximum number of packets that can be processed by the system's service during the maximum required delay, is defined.
Finally, as part of our contribution to address the third issue, we present an analytic model for a QoS-aware scheduling optimization of concurrent intra-SHN traffics with mixed arrival distributions and using probabilistic queuing disciplines. We formulate a hybrid QoS-aware scheduling problem for concurrent traffics in intra-SHN, propose an innovative queuing model (QC-SH) based on the auction economic model of game theory to provide a fair multiple access over different communication channels/ports, and design an applicable model to implement auction game on both sides; traffic sources and the home gateway, without changing the structure of the IEEE 802.11 standard. The results of our work offer SHNs more effective data transfer between all heterogenous connected devices with optimal resource utilization, a dynamic QoS/QoE-aware traffic processing in SHN as well as an innovative model for optimizing concurrent SHN traffic scheduling with enhanced fairness strategy. Numerical results show an improvement up to 90% for network resource utilization, 77% for bandwidth, 40% for scheduling with QoS and QoE and 57% for concurrent traffic scheduling delay using our proposed solutions compared with Traditional methods
Radio Resource Management Optimization For Next Generation Wireless Networks
The prominent versatility of todayâs mobile broadband services and the rapid advancements in the cellular phones industry have led to a tremendous expansion in the wireless market volume. Despite the continuous progress in the radio-access technologies to cope with that expansion, many challenges still remain that need to be addressed by both the research and industrial sectors. One of the many remaining challenges is the efficient allocation and management of wireless network resources when using the latest cellular radio technologies (e.g., 4G). The importance of the problem stems from the scarcity of the wireless spectral resources, the large number of users sharing these resources, the dynamic behavior of generated traffic, and the stochastic nature of wireless channels. These limitations are further tightened as the providerâs commitment to high quality-of-service (QoS) levels especially data rate, delay and delay jitter besides the systemâs spectral and energy efficiencies. In this dissertation, we strive to solve this problem by presenting novel cross-layer resource allocation schemes to address the efficient utilization of available resources versus QoS challenges using various optimization techniques. The main objective of this dissertation is to propose a new predictive resource allocation methodology using an agile ray tracing (RT) channel prediction approach. It is divided into two parts. The first part deals with the theoretical and implementational aspects of the ray tracing prediction model, and its validation. In the second part, a novel RT-based scheduling system within the evolving cloud radio access network (C-RAN) architecture is proposed. The impact of the proposed model on addressing the long term evolution (LTE) network limitations is then rigorously investigated in the form of optimization problems. The main contributions of this dissertation encompass the design of several heuristic solutions based on our novel RT-based scheduling model, developed to meet the aforementioned objectives while considering the co-existing limitations in the context of LTE networks. Both analytical and numerical methods are used within this thesis framework. Theoretical results are validated with numerical simulations. The obtained results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed solutions to meet the objectives subject to limitations and constraints compared to other published works
Vorhersagbares und zur Laufzeit adaptierbares On-Chip Netzwerk fĂŒr gemischt kritische Echtzeitsysteme
The industry of safety-critical and dependable embedded systems calls for even cheaper, high performance platforms that allow flexibility and an efficient verification of safety and real-time requirements. To cope with the increasing complexity of interconnected functions and to reduce the cost and power consumption of the system, multicore systems are used to efficiently integrate different processing units in the same chip. Networks-on-chip (NoCs), as a modular interconnect, are used as a promising solution for such multiprocessor systems on chip (MPSoCs), due to their scalability and performance.
For safety-critical systems, a major goal is the avoidance of hazards. For this, safety-critical systems are qualified or even certified to prove the correctness of the functioning under all possible cases. A predictable behaviour of the NoC can help to ease the qualification process of the system. To achieve the required predictability, designers have two classes of solutions: quality of service mechanisms and (formal) analysis. For mixed-criticality systems, isolation and analysis approaches must be combined to efficiently achieve the desired predictability.
Traditional NoC analysis and architecture concepts tackle only a subpart of the challenges: they focus on either performance or predictability. Existing, predictable NoCs are deemed too expensive and inflexible to host a variety of applications with opposing constraints. And state-of-the-art analyses neglect certain platform properties to verify the behaviour. Together this leads to a high over-provisioning of the hardware resources as well as adverse impacts on system performance, and on the flexibility of the system.
In this work we tackle these challenges and develop a predictable and runtime-adaptable NoC architecture that efficiently integrates mixed-critical applications with opposing constraints. Additionally, we present a modelling and analysis framework for NoCs that accounts for backpressure. This framework enables to evaluate the performance and reliability early at design time. Hence, the designer can assess multiple design decisions by using abstract models and formal approaches.Die Industrie der sicherheitskritischen und zuverlĂ€ssigen eingebetteten Systeme verlangt nach noch gĂŒnstigeren, leistungsfĂ€higeren Plattformen, welche FlexibilitĂ€t und eine effiziente ĂberprĂŒfung der Sicherheits- und Echtzeitanforderungen ermöglichen. Um der zunehmenden KomplexitĂ€t der zunehmend vernetzten Funktionen gerecht zu werden und die Kosten und den Stromverbrauch eines Systems zu reduzieren, werden Mehrkern-Systeme eingesetzt. On-Chip Netzwerke werden aufgrund ihrer Skalierbarkeit und Leistung als vielversprechende Lösung fĂŒr solch Mehrkern-Systeme eingesetzt.
Bei sicherheitskritischen Systemen ist die Vermeidung von Gefahren ein wesentliches Ziel. Dazu werden sicherheitskritische Systeme qualifiziert oder zertifiziert, um die FunktionsfĂ€higkeit in allen möglichen FĂ€llen nachzuweisen. Ein vorhersehbares Verhalten des on-Chip Netzwerks kann dabei helfen, den Qualifizierungsprozess des Systems zu erleichtern. Um die erforderliche Vorhersagbarkeit zu erreichen, gibt es zwei Klassen von Lösungen: Quality of Service Mechanismen und (formale) Analyse. FĂŒr Systeme mit gemischter Relevanz mĂŒssen Isolationsmechanismen und AnalyseansĂ€tze kombiniert werden, um die gewĂŒnschte Vorhersagbarkeit effizient zu erreichen.
Traditionelle Analyse- und Architekturkonzepte fĂŒr on-Chip Netzwerke lösen nur einen Teil dieser Herausforderungen: sie konzentrieren sich entweder auf Leistung oder Vorhersagbarkeit. Existierende vorhersagbare on-Chip Netzwerke werden als zu teuer und unflexibel erachtet, um eine Vielzahl von Anwendungen mit gegensĂ€tzlichen Anforderungen zu integrieren. Und state-of-the-art Analysen vernachlĂ€ssigen bzw. vereinfachen bestimmte Plattformeigenschaften, um das Verhalten ĂŒberprĂŒfen zu können. Dies fĂŒhrt zu einer hohen Ăberbereitstellung der Hardware-Ressourcen als auch zu negativen Auswirkungen auf die Systemleistung und auf die FlexibilitĂ€t des Systems.
In dieser Arbeit gehen wir auf diese Herausforderungen ein und entwickeln eine vorhersehbare und zur Laufzeit anpassbare Architektur fĂŒr on-Chip Netzwerke, welche gemischt-kritische Anwendungen effizient integriert. ZusĂ€tzlich stellen wir ein Modellierungs- und Analyseframework fĂŒr on-Chip Netzwerke vor, das den PaketrĂŒckstau berĂŒcksichtigt. Dieses Framework ermöglicht es, Designentscheidungen anhand abstrakter Modelle und formaler AnsĂ€tze frĂŒhzeitig beurteilen
Polymorphic computing abstraction for heterogeneous architectures
Integration of multiple computing paradigms onto system on chip (SoC) has pushed the boundaries of design space exploration for hardware architectures and computing system software stack. The heterogeneity of computing styles in SoC has created a new class of architectures referred to as Heterogeneous Architectures. Novel applications developed to exploit the different computing styles are user centric for embedded SoC. Software and hardware designers are faced with several challenges to harness the full potential of heterogeneous architectures. Applications have to execute on more than one compute style to increase overall SoC resource utilization. The implication of such an abstraction is that application threads need to be polymorphic. Operating system layer is thus faced with the problem of scheduling polymorphic threads. Resource allocation is also an important problem to be dealt by the OS. Morphism evolution of application threads is constrained by the availability of heterogeneous computing resources. Traditional design optimization goals such as computational power and lower energy per computation are inadequate to satisfy user centric application resource needs. Resource allocation decisions at application layer need to permeate to the architectural layer to avoid conflicting demands which may affect energy-delay characteristics of application threads. We propose Polymorphic computing abstraction as a unified computing model for heterogeneous architectures to address the above issues. Simulation environment for polymorphic applications is developed and evaluated under various scheduling strategies to determine the effectiveness of polymorphism abstraction on resource allocation. User satisfaction model is also developed to complement polymorphism and used for optimization of resource utilization at application and network layer of embedded systems
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