A system for improving the quality of real-time services on the internet

Real-time Internet services are becoming more popular every day, and Voice over Internet Protocol (VOIP) is arguably the most popular of these, despite the quality and reliability problems that are so characteristic of VOIP. This thesis proposes to apply a routing technique called Fully Redundant Dispersity Routing to VOIP and shows how this mitigates these problems to deliver a premium service that is more equal to traditional telephony than VOIP is currently.Fully Redundant Dispersity Routing uses the path diversity readily available in the Internet to route complete copies of the data to be communicated over multiple paths. This allows the effect of a failure on a path to be reduced, and possibly even masked completely, by the other paths. Significantly, rather than expecting changes of the Internet that will improve real-time service quality, this approach simply changes the manner in which real-time services use the Internet, leaving the Internet itself to stay the way it is.First, real VOIP traffic in a commercial call centre is measured (1) to establish a baseline of current quality characteristics against which the effects of Fully Redundant Dispersity Routing may be measured, and (2) as a source of realistic path characteristics. Simulations of various Fully Redundant Dispersity Routing systems that adopt the measured VOIP traffic characteristics then (1) show how this routing technique mitigates quality and reliability problems, and (2) quantify the quality deliverable with the VOIP traffic characteristics measured. For example, quantifying quality as a Mean Opinion Score (MOS) estimated from the measurements with the International Telecommunication Union’s E-model, slightly more than 1 in every 23 of the VOIP telephone calls measured in the call centre is likely to be perceived to be of a quality with which humans would be less than very satisfied. Simulations carried out for this thesis show that using just two paths adopting the same measurements, Fully Redundant Dispersity Routing may increase quality to reduce that proportion to slightly less than 1 in every 10 000 VOIP telephone calls

Constrained random walks on random graphs: routing algorithms for large scale wireless sensor networks

We consider a routing problem in the context of large scale networks with uncontrolled dynamics. A case of uncontrolled dynamics that has been studied extensively is that of mobile nodes, as this is typically the case in cellular and mobile ad-hoc networks. In this paper however we study routing in the presence of a different type of dynamics: nodes do not move, but instead switch between active and inactive states at random times. Our interest in this case is motivated by the behavior of sensor nodes powered by renewable sources, such as solar cells or ambient vibrations. In this paper we formalize the corresponding routing problem as a problem of constructing suitably constrained random walks on random dynamic graphs. We argue that these random walks should be designed so that their resulting invariant distribution achieves a certain load balancing property, and we give simple distributed algorithms to compute the local parameters for the random walks that achieve the sought behavior. A truly novel feature of our formulation is that the algorithms we obtain are able to route messages along all possible routes between a source and a destination node, without performing explicit route discovery/repair computations, and without maintaining explicit state information about available routes at the nodes. To the best of our knowledge, these are the first algorithms that achieve true multipath routing (in a statistical sense), at the complexity of simple stateless operations

Design and implementation of multiple address parallel transmission architecture for storage area network

Master'sMASTER OF ENGINEERIN