TCP Connection Management Mechanisms for Improving Internet Server Performance

This thesis investigates TCP connection management mechanisms in order to understand the behaviour and improve the performance of Internet servers during overload conditions such as flash crowds. We study several alternatives for implementing TCP connection establishment, reviewing approaches taken by existing TCP stacks as well as proposing new mechanisms to improve server throughput and reduce client response times under overload. We implement some of these connection establishment mechanisms in the Linux TCP stack and evaluate their performance in a variety of environments. We also evaluate the cost of supporting half-closed connections at the server and assess the impact of an abortive release of connections by clients on the throughput of an overloaded server. Our evaluation demonstrates that connection establishment mechanisms that eliminate the TCP-level retransmission of connection attempts by clients increase server throughput by up to 40% and reduce client response times by two orders of magnitude. Connection termination mechanisms that preclude support for half-closed connections additionally improve server throughput by up to 18%

milliProxy: a TCP Proxy Architecture for 5G mmWave Cellular Systems

TCP is the most widely used transport protocol in the internet. However, it offers suboptimal performance when operating over high bandwidth mmWave links. The main issues introduced by communications at such high frequencies are (i) the sensitivity to blockage and (ii) the high bandwidth fluctuations due to Line of Sight (LOS) to Non Line of Sight (NLOS) transitions and vice versa. In particular, TCP has an abstract view of the end-to-end connection, which does not properly capture the dynamics of the wireless mmWave link. The consequence is a suboptimal utilization of the available resources. In this paper we propose a TCP proxy architecture that improves the performance of TCP flows without any modification at the remote sender side. The proxy is installed in the Radio Access Network, and exploits information available at the gNB in order to maximize throughput and minimize latency.Comment: 7 pages, 6 figures, 2 tables, presented at the 2017 51st Asilomar Conference on Signals, Systems and Computers, Pacific Grove, CA, 201

Full TCP/IP for 8-Bit architectures

We describe two small and portable TCP/IP implementations fulfilling the subset of RFC1122 requirements needed for full host-to-host interoperability. Our TCP/IP implementations do not sacrifice any of TCP's mechanisms such as urgent data or congestion control. They support IP fragment reassembly and the number of multiple simultaneous connections is limited only by the available RAM. Despite being small and simple, our implementations do not require their peers to have complex, full-size stacks, but can communicate with peers running a similarly light-weight stack. The code size is on the order of 10 kilobytes and RAM usage can be configured to be as low as a few hundred bytes

Re-designing Dynamic Content Delivery in the Light of a Virtualized Infrastructure

We explore the opportunities and design options enabled by novel SDN and NFV technologies, by re-designing a dynamic Content Delivery Network (CDN) service. Our system, named MOSTO, provides performance levels comparable to that of a regular CDN, but does not require the deployment of a large distributed infrastructure. In the process of designing the system, we identify relevant functions that could be integrated in the future Internet infrastructure. Such functions greatly simplify the design and effectiveness of services such as MOSTO. We demonstrate our system using a mixture of simulation, emulation, testbed experiments and by realizing a proof-of-concept deployment in a planet-wide commercial cloud system.Comment: Extended version of the paper accepted for publication in JSAC special issue on Emerging Technologies in Software-Driven Communication - November 201

A survey of communication protocols for internet of things and related challenges of fog and cloud computing integration

The fast increment in the number of IoT (Internet of Things) devices is accelerating the research on new solutions to make cloud services scalable. In this context, the novel concept of fog computing as well as the combined fog-to-cloud computing paradigm is becoming essential to decentralize the cloud, while bringing the services closer to the end-system. This article surveys e application layer communication protocols to fulfill the IoT communication requirements, and their potential for implementation in fog- and cloud-based IoT systems. To this end, the article first briefly presents potential protocol candidates, including request-reply and publish-subscribe protocols. After that, the article surveys these protocols based on their main characteristics, as well as the main performance issues, including latency, energy consumption, and network throughput. These findings are thereafter used to place the protocols in each segment of the system (IoT, fog, cloud), and thus opens up the discussion on their choice, interoperability, and wider system integration. The survey is expected to be useful to system architects and protocol designers when choosing the communication protocols in an integrated IoT-to-fog-to-cloud system architecture.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

System Support for Bandwidth Management and Content Adaptation in Internet Applications

This paper describes the implementation and evaluation of an operating system module, the Congestion Manager (CM), which provides integrated network flow management and exports a convenient programming interface that allows applications to be notified of, and adapt to, changing network conditions. We describe the API by which applications interface with the CM, and the architectural considerations that factored into the design. To evaluate the architecture and API, we describe our implementations of TCP; a streaming layered audio/video application; and an interactive audio application using the CM, and show that they achieve adaptive behavior without incurring much end-system overhead. All flows including TCP benefit from the sharing of congestion information, and applications are able to incorporate new functionality such as congestion control and adaptive behavior.Comment: 14 pages, appeared in OSDI 200

Comparative Study Of Congestion Control Techniques In High Speed Networks

Congestion in network occurs due to exceed in aggregate demand as compared to the accessible capacity of the resources. Network congestion will increase as network speed increases and new effective congestion control methods are needed, especially to handle bursty traffic of todays very high speed networks. Since late 90s numerous schemes i.e. [1]...[10] etc. have been proposed. This paper concentrates on comparative study of the different congestion control schemes based on some key performance metrics. An effort has been made to judge the performance of Maximum Entropy (ME) based solution for a steady state GE/GE/1/N censored queues with partial buffer sharing scheme against these key performance metrics.Comment: 10 pages IEEE format, International Journal of Computer Science and Information Security, IJCSIS November 2009, ISSN 1947 5500, http://sites.google.com/site/ijcsis

A generic communication architecture for end to end mobility management in the Internet

The proliferation of laptops, cellular phones, and other mobile computing platforms connected to the Internet has triggered numerous research works into mobile networking. The increasingly dense set of wireless access networks that can be potentially accessed by mobile users open the door to an era of pervasive computing. However, the puzzle of wireless access networks that tends to become the natural access networks to the Internet pushes legacy“wireoriented” communication architectures to their limit. Indeed, there is a critical gap between the increasingly used stream centric multimedia applications and the incapacity of legacy communication stacks to insure the continuity of these multimedia sessions for mobile users. This paper proposes a generic communication architecture (i.e. not dedicated to a specific protocol or technology) that aims to fill the gap between the application layer continuity needs and the discontinuity of the communication service inherent to the physical layer of wireless mobile networks. This paper introduces an end to end communication architecture that preserves efficiently session continuity in the context of mobile and wireless networks. This architecture is mainly based on end to end mechanisms that could be integrated into a new generation reconfigurable transport protocol. The proposed contribution efficiently satisfies mobility requirements such as efficient location management, fast handover, and continuous connection support