Towards a versatile transport protocol

n the context of a reconfigurable transport protocol, this paper introduces two protocol instances based on the com- position and specialisation of the TFRC congestion control and Selective Acknowledgment mechanisms. The two result- ing transport architectures lead respectively to the QTP_AF protocol, specifically designed to operate over QoS-enabled networks and the QTP_light protocol, specifically designed for resource-limited end systems connected to powerful servers. QTP_AF combines QoS-aware TFRC congestion control with full reliability to provide a transport service similar to TCP but additionally taking into account network-level band-width reservations. QTP_light proposes a modification of TFRC that shifts from the receiver to the sender the complexity of the loss rate estimation mechanism. This modification allows to alleviate the processing and communication load of "light" resource limited mobile receivers. We present the concept of these protocols and their adaptation in the EuQoS European project framework

Towards a sender-based TCP friendly rate control (TFRC) protocol

Pervasive communications are increasingly sent over mobile devices and personal digital assistants. This trend is currently observed by mobile phone service providers which have measured a significant increase in multimedia traffic. To better carry multimedia traffic, the IETF standardized a new TCP Friendly Rate Control (TFRC) protocol. However, the current receiver-based TFRC design is not well suited to resource limited end systems. In this paper, we propose a scheme to shift resource allocation and computation to the sender. This sender-based approach led us to develop a new algorithm for loss notification and loss-rate computation. We detail the complete implementation of a user-level prototype and demonstrate the gain obtained in terms of memory requirements and CPU processing compared to the current design. We also evaluate the performance obtained in terms of throughput smoothness and fairness with TCP and we note this shifting solves security issues raised by classical TFRC implementations

Towards sender-based TFRC

Pervasive communications are increasingly sent over mobile devices and personal digital assistants. This trend has been observed during the last football world cup where cellular phones service providers have measured a significant increase in multimedia traffic. To better carry multimedia traffic, the IETF standardized a new TCP Friendly Rate Control (TFRC) protocol. However, the current receiver-based TFRC design is not well suited to resource limited end systems. We propose a scheme to shift resource allocation and computation to the sender. This sender based approach led us to develop a new algorithm for loss notification and loss rate computation. We demonstrate the gain obtained in terms of memory requirements and CPU processing compared to the current design. Moreover this shifting solves security issues raised by classical TFRC implementations. We have implemented this new sender-based TFRC, named TFRC_light, and conducted measurements under real world conditions

Understanding and modeling the small-world phenomenon in dynamic networks

The small-world phenomenon first introduced in the context of static graphs consists of graphs with high clustering coefficient and low shortest path length. This is an intrinsic property of many real complex static networks. Recent research has shown that this structure is also observable in dynamic networks but how it emerges remains an open problem. In this paper, we propose a model capable of capturing the small-world behavior observed in various real traces. We then study information diffusion in such small-world networks. Analytical and simulation results with epidemic model show that the small-world structure increases dramatically the information spreading speed in dynamic networks

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

On the limits of DTN monitoring

Compared to wired networks, Delay/Disruption Tolerant Networks (DTN) are challenging to monitor due to their lack of infrastructure and the absence of end-to-end paths. This work studies the feasibility, limits and convergence of monitoring such DTNs. More specifically, we focus on the efficient monitoring of intercontact time distribution (ICT) between DTN participants. Our contribution is two-fold. First we propose two schemes to sample data using monitors deployed within the DTN. In particular, we sample and estimate the ICT distribution. Second, we evaluate this scheme over both simulated DTN networks and real DTN traces. Our initial results show that (i) there is a high correlation between the quality of sampling and the sampled mobility type, and (ii) the number and placement of monitors impact the estimation of the ICT distribution of the whole DTN

On the feasibility of monitoring DTN: Impacts of fine tuning on routing protocols and the user experience

The “machine to machine” communication paradigm will become a central element for mobile networks. This paradigm can be easily constructed by a contact-based network, notably a disruption/delay tolerant networks (DTN). To characterize a DTN, we can use the Inter-contact time among the nodes. The better understanding of inter-contact time (ICT) has practical applications on the tuning of forwarding strategies, and hence in the quality of the User Experience. Nevertheless, the fine tuning of those parameters is tight to a set of assumptions about the regularity of movement or periodicity of patterns in an usually non complete and cumbersome statistical analysis. That is why in a dynamic environment where we cannot assume any previous information the tuning of parameters is usually overestimated. In this work we study how monitoring can help to adapt those parameters to give a better understanding of both natural evolution of the network and non periodical events

A novel middleware for the mobility management over the Internet

The features of mobility, which enormously impact on how communication is evolving into the future, represent a particular challenge in today’s wireless networking research. After an identification and evaluation of the gap between the discontinuities of the communication service inherent to the physical layer of mobile networks and the continuity requirements issue from the stream centric multimedia applications, we propose a novel middleware 3MOI (Middleware for the Mobility Management Over the Internet) which can perform efficient and context-aware mobility management and satisfy new mobility requirements such as dynamical location management, fast handover, and continuous connection support

Mobile TFRC: a congestion control for WLANs

Based on an identification and evaluation of the subtle counterproductive interactions between the WLANs MAC layer and the transport layer, this paper shows a new approach towards congestion control for WLANs. We introduce a specialization of TFRC (MTFRC: Mobile TFRC), which is adapted to wireless access networks. This TFRC specialization requires only slight changes to the standard TFRC protocol. Simulation results show substantial improvements for applications over TFRC in scenarios where the bottleneck situates on the MAC layer of the mobile nodes

SPAD: a distributed middleware architecture for QoS enhanced alternate path discovery

In the next generation Internet, the network will evolve from a plain communication medium into one that provides endless services to the users. These services will be composed of multiple cooperative distributed application elements. We name these services overlay applications. The cooperative application elements within an overlay application will build a dynamic communication mesh, namely an overlay association. The Quality of Service (QoS) perceived by the users of an overlay application greatly depends on the QoS experienced on the communication paths of the corresponding overlay association. In this paper, we present SPAD (Super-Peer Alternate path Discovery), a distributed middleware architecture that aims at providing enhanced QoS between end-points within an overlay association. To achieve this goal, SPAD provides a complete scheme to discover and utilize composite alternate end-to end paths with better QoS than the path given by the default IP routing mechanisms