Traffic Management and Congestion Control in the ATM Network Model.

Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) networking technology has been chosen by the International Telegraph and Telephony Consultative Committee (CCITT) for use on future local as well as wide area networks to handle traffic types of a wide range. It is a cell based network architecture that resembles circuit switched networks, providing Quality of Service (QoS) guarantees not normally found on data networks. Although the specifications for the architecture have been continuously evolving, traffic congestion management techniques for ATM networks have not been very well defined yet. This thesis studies the traffic management problem in detail, provides some theoretical understanding and presents a collection of techniques to handle the problem under various operating conditions. A detailed simulation of various ATM traffic types is carried out and the collected data is analyzed to gain an insight into congestion formation patterns. Problems that may arise during migration planning from legacy LANs to ATM technology are also considered. We present an algorithm to identify certain portions of the network that should be upgraded to ATM first. The concept of adaptive burn-in is introduced to help ease the computational costs involved in virtual circuit setup and tear down operations

Limits To Certainty in QoS Pricing and Bandwidth

Advanced services require more reliable bandwidth than currently provided by the Internet Protocol, even with the reliability enhancements provided by TCP. More reliable bandwidth will be provided through QoS (quality of service), as currently discussed widely. Yet QoS has some implications beyond providing ubiquitous access to advance Internet service, which are of interest from a policy perspective. In particular, what are the implications for price of Internet services? Further, how will these changes impact demand and universal service for the Internet. This paper explores the relationship between certainty of bandwidth and certainty of price for Internet services over a statistically shared network and finds that these are mutually exclusive goals.Comment: 29th TPRC Conference, 200

Quality of Service over Specific Link Layers: state of the art report

The Integrated Services concept is proposed as an enhancement to the current Internet architecture, to provide a better Quality of Service (QoS) than that provided by the traditional Best-Effort service. The features of the Integrated Services are explained in this report. To support Integrated Services, certain requirements are posed on the underlying link layer. These requirements are studied by the Integrated Services over Specific Link Layers (ISSLL) IETF working group. The status of this ongoing research is reported in this document. To be more specific, the solutions to provide Integrated Services over ATM, IEEE 802 LAN technologies and low-bitrate links are evaluated in detail. The ISSLL working group has not yet studied the requirements, that are posed on the underlying link layer, when this link layer is wireless. Therefore, this state of the art report is extended with an identification of the requirements that are posed on the underlying wireless link, to provide differentiated Quality of Service

An Energy-Efficient Reconfigurable Circuit Switched Network-on-Chip

Network-on-Chip (NoC) is an energy-efficient on-chip communication architecture for multi-tile System-on-Chip (SoC) architectures. The SoC architecture, including its run-time software, can replace inflexible ASICs for future ambient systems. These ambient systems have to be flexible as well as energy-efficient. To find an energy-efficient solution for the communication network we analyze three wireless applications. Based on their communication requirements we observe that revisiting of the circuit switching techniques is beneficial. In this paper we propose a new energy-efficient reconfigurable circuit-switched Network-on-Chip. By physically separating the concurrent data streams we reduce the overall energy consumption. The circuit-switched router has been synthesized and analyzed for its power consumption in 0.13 ¿m technology. A 5-port circuit-switched router has an area of 0.05 mm2 and runs at 1075 MHz. The proposed architecture consumes 3.5 times less energy compared to its packet-switched equivalen

Resource management in IP-based radio access networks

IP is being considered to be used in the Radio Access Network (RAN) of UMTS. It is of paramount importance to be able to provide good QoS guarantees to real time services in such an IP-based RAN. QoS in IP networks is most efficiently provided with Differentiated services (Diffserv). However, currently Diffserv mainly specifies Per Hop Behaviors (PHB). Proper mechanisms for admission control and resource reservation have not yet been defined. A new resource management concept in the IP-based RAN is needed to offer QoS guarantees to real time services. We investigate the current Diffserv mechanisms and contribute to development of a new resource management protocol. We focus on the load control algorithm [9], which is an attempt to solve the problem of admission control and resource reservation in IP-based networks. In this document we present some load control issues and propose to enhance the load control protocol with the Measurement Based Admission Control (MBAC) concept. With this enhancement the traffic load in the IP-based RAN can be estimated, since the ingress router in the network path can be notified by marking packets with the resource state information. With this knowledge, the ingress router can perform admission control to keep the IP-based RAN stable with a high utilization even in overload situations

Using network calculus to optimize the AFDX network

This paper presents quantitative results we obtained when optimizing the setting of priorities of the AFDX traffic flows, with the objective to obtain tighter latency and queue-size deterministic bounds (those bounds are calculated by our Network Calculus tool). We first point out the fact that setting randomly the priorities gives worse bounds than using no priorities, and we then show experiments on the basis of classic optimization techniques such as a descent method and a tentative AlphaBetaassisted brute-force approach: both of them haven’t brought significantly better results. We finally present experiments based on genetic algorithms, and we show how driving these algorithms in an adequate way has allowed us to deliver a full range of priority configurations that bring tighter bounds and allow the network traffic designer to trade off average gains of 40% on all the latency bounds against focused improvement on the largest queue-size bound (up to a 30% reduction)

Analysis of algorithms for online routing and scheduling in networks

We study situations in which an algorithm must make decisions about how to best route and schedule data transfer requests in a communication network before each transfer leaves its source. For some situations, such as those requiring quality of service guarantees, this is essential. For other situations, doing work in advance can simplify decisions in transit and increase the speed of the network. In order to reflect realistic scenarios, we require that our algorithms be online, or make their decisions without knowing future requests. We measure the efficiency of an online algorithm by its competitive ratio, which is the maximum ratio, over all request sequences, of the cost of the online algorithm\u27s solution to that of an optimal solution constructed by knowing all the requests in advance.;We identify and study two distinct variations of this general problem. In the first, data transfer requests are permanent virtual circuit requests in a circuit-switched network and the goal is to minimize the network congestion caused by the route assignment. In the second variation, data transfer requests are packets in a packet-switched network and the goal is to minimize the makespan of the schedule, or the time that the last packet reaches its destination. We present new lower bounds on the competitive ratio of any online algorithm with respect to both network congestion and makespan.;We consider two greedy online algorithms for permanent virtual circuit routing on arbitrary networks with unit capacity links, and prove both lower and upper bounds on their competitive ratios. While these greedy algorithms are not optimal, they can be expected to perform well in many circumstances and require less time to make a decision, when compared to a previously discovered asymptotically optimal online algorithm. For the online packet routing and scheduling problem, we consider an algorithm which simply assigns to each packet a priority based upon its arrival time. No packet is delayed by another packet with a lower priority. We analyze the competitive ratio of this algorithm on linear array, tree, and ring networks

Survey of unified approaches to integrated-service networks

The increasing demand for communication services, coupled with recent technological advances in communication media and switching techniques, has resulted in a proliferation of new and expanded services. Currently, networks are needed which can transmit voice, data, and video services in an application-independent fashion. Unified approaches employ a single switching technique across the entire network bandwidth, thus, allowing services to be switched in an application-independent manner. This paper presents a taxonomy of integrated-service networks including a look at N-ISDN, while focusing on unified approaches to integrated-service networks.The two most promising unified approaches are burst and fast packet switching. Burst switching is a circuit switching-based approach which allocates channel bandwidth to a connection only during the transmission of "bursts" of information. Fast packet switching is a packet switching-based approach which can be characterized by very high transmission rates on network links and simple, hardwired protocols which match the rapid channel speed of the network. Both approaches are being proposed as possible implementations for integrated-service networks. We survey these two approaches, and also examine the key performance issues found in fast packet switching. We then present the results of a simulation study of a fast packet switching network

The Design of a System Architecture for Mobile Multimedia Computers

This chapter discusses the system architecture of a portable computer, called Mobile Digital Companion, which provides support for handling multimedia applications energy efficiently. Because battery life is limited and battery weight is an important factor for the size and the weight of the Mobile Digital Companion, energy management plays a crucial role in the architecture. As the Companion must remain usable in a variety of environments, it has to be flexible and adaptable to various operating conditions. The Mobile Digital Companion has an unconventional architecture that saves energy by using system decomposition at different levels of the architecture and exploits locality of reference with dedicated, optimised modules. The approach is based on dedicated functionality and the extensive use of energy reduction techniques at all levels of system design. The system has an architecture with a general-purpose processor accompanied by a set of heterogeneous autonomous programmable modules, each providing an energy efficient implementation of dedicated tasks. A reconfigurable internal communication network switch exploits locality of reference and eliminates wasteful data copies