PPR: Partial Packet Recovery for Wireless Networks

Bit errors occur over wireless channels when the signal isn't strongenough to overcome the effects of interference and noise. Currentwireless protocols may use forward error correction (FEC) to correct forsome (small) number of bit errors, but generally retransmit the wholepacket if the FEC is insufficient. We observe that current wirelessmesh network protocols retransmit a number of packets and that most ofthese retransmissions end up sending bits that have already beenreceived multiple times, wasting network capacity. To overcome thisinefficiency, we develop, implement, and evaluate a partial packetrecovery (PPR) system.PPR incorporates three new ideas: (1) SoftPHY, an expandedphysical layer (PHY) interface to provide hints to the higher layersabout how ``close'' the actual received symbol was to the one decoded,(2) a postamble scheme to recover data even when a packet'spreamble is corrupted and not decodable at the receiver, and (3) PP-ARQ, an asynchronous link-layer retransmission protocol that allowsa receiver to compactly encode and request for retransmission only thoseportions of a packet that are likely in error.Our experimental results from a 27-node 802.15.4 testbed that includesTelos motes with 2.4 GHz Chipcon radios and GNU Radio nodes implementingthe Zigbee standard (802.15.4) show that PPR increases the framedelivery rate by a factor of 2x under moderate load, and7x under heavy load when many links have marginal quality

Traffic-aware techniques to reduce 3G/LTE wireless energy consumption

The 3G/LTE wireless interface is a significant contributor to battery drain on mobile devices. A large portion of the energy is consumed by unnecessarily keeping the mobile device's radio in its "Active" mode even when there is no traffic. This paper describes the design of methods to reduce this portion of energy consumption by learning the traffic patterns and predicting when a burst of traffic will start or end. We develop a technique to determine when to change the radio's state from Active to Idle, and another to change the radio's state from Idle to Active. In evaluating the methods on real usage data from 9 users over 28 total days on four different carriers, we find that the energy savings range between 51% and 66% across the carriers for 3G, and is 67% on the Verizon LTE network. When allowing for delays of a few seconds (acceptable for background applications), the energy savings increase to between 62% and 75% for 3G, and 71% for LTE. The increased delays reduce the number of state switches to be the same as in current networks with existing inactivity timers.National Science Foundation (U.S.) (Grant CNS-0931550

Component Approach to Software Development for Distributed Multi-Database System

The paper deals with a component based approach for software development in a distributed environment for the database retrieval operations. A Core Component for a distributed multi-database system has been proposed. The core Component is modeled using three interfaces User, Administrator and Databases Handler. The User Interface is the starting point of access for the Core Component. The Administrator interface deals with access control privileges for users and local databases. The Database Handler facilitates global schema management and site management.Assertion, Core Component, Component Based Software Development, Multi-Database, Schema

ABC: A Simple Explicit Congestion Controller for Wireless Networks

We propose Accel-Brake Control (ABC), a simple and deployable explicit congestion control protocol for network paths with time-varying wireless links. ABC routers mark each packet with an "accelerate" or "brake", which causes senders to slightly increase or decrease their congestion windows. Routers use this feedback to quickly guide senders towards a desired target rate. ABC requires no changes to header formats or user devices, but achieves better performance than XCP. ABC is also incrementally deployable; it operates correctly when the bottleneck is a non-ABC router, and can coexist with non-ABC traffic sharing the same bottleneck link. We evaluate ABC using a Wi-Fi implementation and trace-driven emulation of cellular links. ABC achieves 30-40% higher throughput than Cubic+Codel for similar delays, and 2.2X lower delays than BBR on a Wi-Fi path. On cellular network paths, ABC achieves 50% higher throughput than Cubic+Codel

Mosh: An Interactive Remote Shell for Mobile Clients

Mosh (mobile shell) is a remote terminal application that supports intermittent connectivity, allows roaming, and speculatively and safely echoes user keystrokes for better interactive response over high-latency paths. Mosh is built on the State Synchronization Protocol (SSP), a new UDP-based protocol that securely synchronizes client and server state, even across changes of the client’s IP address. Mosh uses SSP to synchronize a character-cell terminal emulator, maintaining terminal state at both client and server to predictively echo keystrokes. Our evaluation analyzed keystroke traces from six different users covering a period of 40 hours of real-world usage. Mosh was able to immediately display the effects of 70% of the user keystrokes. Over a commercial EV-DO (3G) network, median keystroke response latency with Mosh was less than 5 ms, compared with 503 ms for SSH. Mosh is free software, available from http://mosh.mit.edu. It was downloaded more than 15,000 times in the first week of its release.National Science Foundation (U.S.) (NSF grant 1040072)National Science Foundation (U.S.) (NSF grant 0721702

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

Flowtune: Flowlet Control for Datacenter Networks

Rapid convergence to a desired allocation of network resources to endpoint traffic has been a long-standing challenge for packet-switched networks. The reason for this is that congestion control decisions are distributed across the endpoints, which vary their offered load in response to changes in application demand and network feedback on a packet-by-packet basis. We propose a different approach for datacenter networks, flowlet control, in which congestion control decisions are made at the granularity of a flowlet, not a packet. With flowlet control, allocations have to change only when flowlets arrive or leave. We have implemented this idea in a system called Flowtune using a centralized allocator that receives flowlet start and end notifications from endpoints. The allocator computes optimal rates using a new, fast method for network utility maximization, and updates endpoint congestion-control parameters. Experiments show that Flowtune outperforms DCTCP, pFabric, sfqCoDel, and XCP on tail packet delays in various settings, converging to optimal rates within a few packets rather than over several RTTs. Our implementation of Flowtune handles 10.4x more throughput per core and scales to 8x more cores than Fastpass, for an 83-fold throughput gain