Congestion control schemes for single and parallel TCP flows in high bandwidth-delay product networks

In this work, we focus on congestion control mechanisms in Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) for emerging very-high bandwidth-delay product networks and suggest several congestion control schemes for parallel and single-flow TCP. Recently, several high-speed TCP proposals have been suggested to overcome the limited throughput achievable by single-flow TCP by modifying its congestion control mechanisms. In the meantime, users overcome the throughput limitations in high bandwidth-delay product networks by using multiple parallel TCP flows, without modifying TCP itself. However, the evident lack of fairness between the high-speed TCP proposals (or parallel TCP) and existing standard TCP has increasingly become an issue. In many scenarios where flows require high throughput, such as grid computing or content distribution networks, often multiple connections go to the same or nearby destinations and tend to share long portions of paths (and bottlenecks). In such cases benefits can be gained by sharing congestion information. To take advantage of this additional information, we first propose a collaborative congestion control scheme for parallel TCP flows. Although the use of parallel TCP flows is an easy and effective way for reliable high-speed data transfer, parallel TCP flows are inherently unfair with respect to single TCP flows. In this thesis we propose, implement, and evaluate a natural extension for aggregated aggressiveness control in parallel TCP flows. To improve the effectiveness of single TCP flows over high bandwidth-delay product networks without causing fairness problems, we suggest a new TCP congestion control scheme that effectively and fairly utilizes high bandwidth-delay product networks by adaptively controlling the flowÂs aggressiveness according to network situations using a competition detection mechanism. We argue that competition detection is more appropriate than congestion detection or bandwidth estimation. We further extend the adaptive aggressiveness control mechanism and the competition detection mechanism from single flows to parallel flows. In this way we achieve adaptive aggregated aggressiveness control. Our evaluations show that the resulting implementation is effective and fair. As a result, we show that single or parallel TCP flows in end-hosts can achieve high performance over emerging high bandwidth-delay product networks without requiring special support from networks or modifications to receivers

FastM: Design and Evaluation of a Fast Mobility Mechanism for Wireless Mesh Networks

Although there is a large volume of work in the literature in terms of mobility approaches for Wireless Mesh Networks, usually these approaches introduce high latency in the handover process and do not support realtime services and applications. Moreover, mobility is decoupled from routing, which leads to inefficiency to both mobility and routing approaches with respect to mobility. In this paper we present a new extension to proactive routing protocols using a fast mobility extension, FastM, with the purpose of increasing handover performance in Wireless Mesh Networks. With this new extension, a new concept is created to integrate information between neighbor wireless mesh routers, managing locations of clients associated to wireless mesh routers in a certain neighborhood, and avoiding packet loss during handover. The proposed mobility approach is able to optimize the handover process without imposing any modifications to the current IEE 802.11 MAC protocol and use unmodified clients. Results show the improved efficiency of the proposed scheme: metrics such as disconnection time, throughput, packet loss and control overhead are largely improved when compared to previous approaches. Moreover, these conclusions apply to mobility scenarios, although mobility decreases the performance of the handover approach, as expected

Transport Protocol Throughput Fairness

Interest continues to grow in alternative transport protocols to the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP). These alternatives include protocols designed to give greater efficiency in high-speed, high-delay environments (so-called high-speed TCP variants), and protocols that provide congestion control without reliability. For the former category, along with the deployed base of ‘vanilla’ TCP – TCP NewReno – the TCP variants BIC and CUBIC are widely used within Linux: for the latter category, the Datagram Congestion Control Protocol (DCCP) is currently on the IETF Standards Track. It is clear that future traffic patterns will consist of a mix of flows from these protocols (and others). So, it is important for users and network operators to be aware of the impact that these protocols may have on users. We show the measurement of fairness in throughput performance of DCCP Congestion Control ID 2 (CCID2) relative to TCP NewReno, and variants Binary Increase Congestion control (BIC), CUBIC and Compound, all in “out-of-the box” configurations. We use a testbed and endto- end measurements to assess overall throughput, and also to assess fairness – how well these protocols might respond to each other when operating over the same end-to-end network path. We find that, in our testbed, DCCP CCID2 shows good fairness with NewReno, while BIC, CUBIC and Compound show unfairness above round-trip times of 25ms

Performance evaluation of multipath transport protocol in heterogeneous network environments

Performance of multipath transport protocols is known to be sensitive to path asymmetry. The difference between each path in terms of bandwidth, delay and packet loss has a potential to significantly decrease the overall performance of a data flow carried over multiple asymmetric paths. In this paper, we evaluate and analyse reliable data transfer in Concurrent Multipath Transfer extension of Stream Control Transport Protocol (CMT-SCTP) under various conditions of network asymmetry, with a focus on the use case where 3G and Wi-Fi networks are simultaneously available. We identify various causes of performance degradation, review the impact of CMT-SACK extension under path asymmetry and show that the total achievable goodput of a reliable in-order data flow over multiple heterogeneous paths is ruled by the characteristics of the worst path as perceived by the transport protocol. To support our study, we derive a simple analytical model of the receiver window blocking and validate it via simulation

Less-than-Best-Effort capacity sharing over high BDP networks with LEDBAT

There has been a renewed interest at the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) in using Less-than-Best Effort (LBE) methods for background applications. IETF recently published a RFC for Low Extra Delay Background Transport (LEDBAT), a congestion control algorithm for LBE transmissions. This paper provides an analysis of LEDBAT performance over congested large bandwidth X delay product (LBDP) networks, and assesses the validity of having a fixed target queuing time. In particular, we lead a study of the impact of this target queuing delay when LEDBAT is used over 4G satellite networks. The rationale is to explore the possibility to grab the unused 4G satellite links' capacity to carry non-commercial traffic. We show that this is achievable with LEDBAT. However, depending on the fluctuation of the load, performance improvements could be obtained by properly setting the target value. We generalize this evaluation over different congested LBDP networks and confirm that the target value might need to be adjusted to networks' and traffic's characteristics. Further work will study whether and how this parameter should be dynamically adapted, and LEDBAT's congestion control improved

A testbed for MANETs: Implementation, experiences and learned lessons

In this paper, we present the implementation, experiences and lessons learned of our tesbed for Ad-hoc networks and Mobile Ad hoc Networks (MANETs). We used OLSR protocol for real experimental evaluation. We investigate the effect of mobility and topology changing in the throughput of a MANET. We study the impact of best-effort traffic for Mesh Topology and Linear Topology. In this work, we consider eight experimental models and we assess the performance of our testbed in terms of throughput, round trip time and packet loss. We found that some of the OLSR's problems can be solved, for instance the routing loop, but this protocol still has the self-interference problem. Also, there is an intricate interdependence between MAC layer and routing layer. We carried out the experiments considering stationary nodes of an Ad-hoc network and the node mobility of MANETs. We found that throughput of TCP was improved by reducing Link Quality Window Size (LQWS). For TCP data flow, we got better results when the LQWS value was 10. Moreover, we found that the node join and leave operations increase the packet loss. The OLSR protocol has a good performance when the source node is moving. However, the performance is not good when the relay nodes are moving.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

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

De-ossifying the Internet Transport Layer : A Survey and Future Perspectives

ACKNOWLEDGMENT The authors would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their useful suggestions and comments.Peer reviewedPublisher PD