ABE: providing a low-delay service within best effort

Alternative best effort (ABE) is a novel service for IP networks, which relies on the idea of providing low delay at the expense of possibly less throughput. The objective is to retain the simplicity of the original Internet single-class best-effort service while providing low delay to interactive adaptive applications

Advances in Internet Quality of Service

We describe recent advances in theories and architecture that support performance guarantees needed for quality of service networks. We start with deterministic computations and give applications to integrated services, differentiated services, and playback delays. We review the methods used for obtaining a scalable integrated services support, based on the concept of a stateless core. New probabilistic results that can be used for a statistical dimensioning of differentiated services are explained; some are based on classical queuing theory, while others capitalize on the deterministic results. Then we discuss performance guarantees in a best effort context; we review: methods to provide some quality of service in a pure best effort environment; methods to provide some quality of service differentiation without access control, and methods that allow an application to control the performance it receives, in the absence of network support

Theories and Models for Internet Quality of Service

We survey recent advances in theories and models for Internet Quality of Service (QoS). We start with the theory of network calculus, which lays the foundation for support of deterministic performance guarantees in networks, and illustrate its applications to integrated services, differentiated services, and streaming media playback delays. We also present mechanisms and architecture for scalable support of guaranteed services in the Internet, based on the concept of a stateless core. Methods for scalable control operations are also briefly discussed. We then turn our attention to statistical performance guarantees, and describe several new probabilistic results that can be used for a statistical dimensioning of differentiated services. Lastly, we review recent proposals and results in supporting performance guarantees in a best effort context. These include models for elastic throughput guarantees based on TCP performance modeling, techniques for some quality of service differentiation without access control, and methods that allow an application to control the performance it receives, in the absence of network support

Differentiated Predictive Fair Service for TCP Flows

The majority of the traffic (bytes) flowing over the Internet today have been attributed to the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP). This strong presence of TCP has recently spurred further investigations into its congestion avoidance mechanism and its effect on the performance of short and long data transfers. At the same time, the rising interest in enhancing Internet services while keeping the implementation cost low has led to several service-differentiation proposals. In such service-differentiation architectures, much of the complexity is placed only in access routers, which classify and mark packets from different flows. Core routers can then allocate enough resources to each class of packets so as to satisfy delivery requirements, such as predictable (consistent) and fair service. In this paper, we investigate the interaction among short and long TCP flows, and how TCP service can be improved by employing a low-cost service-differentiation scheme. Through control-theoretic arguments and extensive simulations, we show the utility of isolating TCP flows into two classes based on their lifetime/size, namely one class of short flows and another of long flows. With such class-based isolation, short and long TCP flows have separate service queues at routers. This protects each class of flows from the other as they possess different characteristics, such as burstiness of arrivals/departures and congestion/sending window dynamics. We show the benefits of isolation, in terms of better predictability and fairness, over traditional shared queueing systems with both tail-drop and Random-Early-Drop (RED) packet dropping policies. The proposed class-based isolation of TCP flows has several advantages: (1) the implementation cost is low since it only requires core routers to maintain per-class (rather than per-flow) state; (2) it promises to be an effective traffic engineering tool for improved predictability and fairness for both short and long TCP flows; and (3) stringent delay requirements of short interactive transfers can be met by increasing the amount of resources allocated to the class of short flows.National Science Foundation (CAREER ANI-0096045, MRI EIA-9871022

Towards End-to-End QoS in Ad Hoc Networks

http://citi.insa-lyon.fr/wons2006/index.htmlIn this paper, we address the problem of supporting adaptive QoS resource management in mobile ad hoc networks, by proposing an efficient model for providing proportional endto- end QoS between classes. The effectiveness of our proposed solution in meeting desired QoS differentiation at a specific node and from end-to-end are assessed by simulation using a queueing network model implemented in QNAP. The experiments results show that the proposed solution provides consistent proportional differentiation for any service class and validates our claim even under bursty traffic and fading channel conditions

Minimizing queueing delays in computer networks

Ph.DDOCTOR OF PHILOSOPH

An adaptive algorithm for Internet multimedia delivery in a DiffServ environment.

To meet the Quality of Service (QoS) requirements of multimedia applications and to reduce the network congestion, several service models and mechanisms have been proposed. Among these, Differentiated Service (DiffServ) architecture has been considered as a scalable and flexible QoS architecture for the Internet. DiffServ provides class-based QoS guarantees. Applications in different classes receive different QoS and are priced differently. If network congestion occurs, DiffServ may not be able to guarantee the QoS for the application. Thus, the QoS may not reflect the price paid for the service. A problem of considerable economic and research importance is how to achieve a good price and quality tradeoff even at times of congestion. This thesis presents an Adaptive Class Switching Algorithm (ACSA) which intends to provide good quality with good price for real-time multimedia applications in a DiffServ environment. The ACSA algorithm combines the techniques of Real-time Transport Protocol (RTP), DiffServ, and Adaptation together. It also takes both QoS and price into account to provide users a good QoS with a good price. The algorithm dynamically selects the most suitable class based on both the QoS feedback received and the highest user utility. The user utility is a function of quality, price, and the weight which reflects the relative sensitivity to quality and price. The class with the highest user utility is the class that provides the best quality and price tradeoff. The QoS feedback is conveyed by RTP\u27s Control Protocol (RTCP) Receiver Reports. The results of simulation demonstrate that ACSA can react fast to the current class state in the network and reflects the best QoS and price tradeoff. It always seeks to find a class which provides the highest user utility except when the Internet is congested and the required QoS in all classes can not be satisfied. If this happens, the real-time multimedia flow chooses Best-Effort class with no payment. (Abstract shortened by UMI.) Paper copy at Leddy Library: Theses & Major Papers - Basement, West Bldg. / Call Number: Thesis2005 .F46. Source: Masters Abstracts International, Volume: 44-01, page: 0389. Thesis (M.Sc.)--University of Windsor (Canada), 2005