Combined Intra- and Inter-domain Traffic Engineering using Hot-Potato Aware Link Weights Optimization

A well-known approach to intradomain traffic engineering consists in finding the set of link weights that minimizes a network-wide objective function for a given intradomain traffic matrix. This approach is inadequate because it ignores a potential impact on interdomain routing. Indeed, the resulting set of link weights may trigger BGP to change the BGP next hop for some destination prefixes, to enforce hot-potato routing policies. In turn, this results in changes in the intradomain traffic matrix that have not been anticipated by the link weights optimizer, possibly leading to degraded network performance. We propose a BGP-aware link weights optimization method that takes these effects into account, and even turns them into an advantage. This method uses the interdomain traffic matrix and other available BGP data, to extend the intradomain topology with external virtual nodes and links, on which all the well-tuned heuristics of a classical link weights optimizer can be applied. A key innovative asset of our method is its ability to also optimize the traffic on the interdomain peering links. We show, using an operational network as a case study, that our approach does so efficiently at almost no extra computational cost.Comment: 12 pages, Short version to be published in ACM SIGMETRICS 2008, International Conference on Measurement and Modeling of Computer Systems, June 2-6, 2008, Annapolis, Maryland, US

Wireless industrial monitoring and control networks: the journey so far and the road ahead

While traditional wired communication technologies have played a crucial role in industrial monitoring and control networks over the past few decades, they are increasingly proving to be inadequate to meet the highly dynamic and stringent demands of today’s industrial applications, primarily due to the very rigid nature of wired infrastructures. Wireless technology, however, through its increased pervasiveness, has the potential to revolutionize the industry, not only by mitigating the problems faced by wired solutions, but also by introducing a completely new class of applications. While present day wireless technologies made some preliminary inroads in the monitoring domain, they still have severe limitations especially when real-time, reliable distributed control operations are concerned. This article provides the reader with an overview of existing wireless technologies commonly used in the monitoring and control industry. It highlights the pros and cons of each technology and assesses the degree to which each technology is able to meet the stringent demands of industrial monitoring and control networks. Additionally, it summarizes mechanisms proposed by academia, especially serving critical applications by addressing the real-time and reliability requirements of industrial process automation. The article also describes certain key research problems from the physical layer communication for sensor networks and the wireless networking perspective that have yet to be addressed to allow the successful use of wireless technologies in industrial monitoring and control networks

CloudJet4BigData: Streamlining Big Data via an Accelerated Socket Interface

Big data needs to feed users with fresh processing results and cloud platforms can be used to speed up big data applications. This paper describes a new data communication protocol (CloudJet) for long distance and large volume big data accessing operations to alleviate the large latencies encountered in sharing big data resources in the clouds. It encapsulates a dynamic multi-stream/multi-path engine at the socket level, which conforms to Portable Operating System Interface (POSIX) and thereby can accelerate any POSIX-compatible applications across IP based networks. It was demonstrated that CloudJet accelerates typical big data applications such as very large database (VLDB), data mining, media streaming and office applications by up to tenfold in real-world tests

Local heuristic for the refinement of multi-path routing in wireless mesh networks

We consider wireless mesh networks and the problem of routing end-to-end traffic over multiple paths for the same origin-destination pair with minimal interference. We introduce a heuristic for path determination with two distinguishing characteristics. First, it works by refining an extant set of paths, determined previously by a single- or multi-path routing algorithm. Second, it is totally local, in the sense that it can be run by each of the origins on information that is available no farther than the node's immediate neighborhood. We have conducted extensive computational experiments with the new heuristic, using AODV and OLSR, as well as their multi-path variants, as underlying routing methods. For two different CSMA settings (as implemented by 802.11) and one TDMA setting running a path-oriented link scheduling algorithm, we have demonstrated that the new heuristic is capable of improving the average throughput network-wide. When working from the paths generated by the multi-path routing algorithms, the heuristic is also capable to provide a more evenly distributed traffic pattern