18883067
On selection of candidate paths for proportional routing
QoS routing involves selection of paths for flows based on the knowledge at network nodes about the availability of resources along paths, and the QoS requirements of flows. Several QoS routing schemes have been proposed that differ in the way they gather information about the network state and select paths using this information. Most of these schemes can be categorized as best path routing where a source node selects the "best" path for each incoming flow based on its current view of the global network state. It has been shown that best path routing schemes require frequent exchange of network state, imposing both communication overhead on the network and processing overheads on the core routers. On the other hand, proportional routing schemes proportion incoming flows among a set of candidate paths. Two key questions that arise under proportional routing are how to select candidate paths and how to proportion flows among candidate paths. We propose a scheme that selects a few widest disjoint paths as candidates and equalizes the blocking probabilities of the candidate paths. We show that our proportional routing approach yields higher throughput with lower overhead than best path routing approach. Furthermore, we present a method for aggregating the state of an area and extend the proportional routing approach to provide hierarchical routing across multiple areas in a large network.
14053219
Distributed Algorithm for Service Replication in Service Overlay Network
The service overlay network (SON) is an effective mean to deploy end-to-end QoS guaranteed content delivery services on the current Internet. We model the content delivery service on a SON as a service delivery tree (SDT). Previous studies have addressed the optimal distribution tree formulation issues. In this paper, we focus on the problem of maximizing the total operation profit of the SON. In [1], authors introduced a cost model for optimal bandwidth provisioning in SON. In this paper, we extended this concept and propose an alternative approach to maximize the total effective throughput of SDT as well as to minimize the QoS violation penalty of the SON by service replication. We present both centralized and distributed algorithms for the placement of replicated servers on the SDT. Experiments are carried to quantify the merit, effectiveness and the scalability of the proposed service replication algorithm. In particular, the performance gain is very close to the exhaustive search. The algorithm performs well when we scale up the service overlay networks. Finally, we show that one only needs to perform a small number of replications to attain the optimal gain.
14141879
Improving VoIP quality through path switching
The current best-effort Internet cannot readily provide the service guarantees that VoIP applications often require. Path switching can potentially address this problem without requiring new network mechanisms, simply by leveraging the robustness to performance variations available from connectivity options such as multi-homing and overlays. In this paper, we evaluate the effectiveness and benefits of path switching in improving the quality of VoIP applications, and demonstrate its feasibility through the design and implementation of a prototype gateway. We argue for an application-driven path switching system that accounts for both network path characteristics and application-specific factors (e.g., codec algorithms, playout buffering schemes). We also develop an application path quality estimator based on the ITU-T E-model for voice quality assessment, and an application-driven path switching algorithm that dynamically adapts the time scales over which path switching decisions are made to maximize voice quality. Through network emulation and experiments over a wide-area multi-homed test bed, we show that, with sufficient path diversity, path switching can yield meaningful improvements in voice quality. Hence by exploiting the inherent path diversity of the Internet, application-driven path switching is a viable option in providing quality-of-service to applications.
3065647
A core stateless bandwidth broker architecture for scalable support of guaranteed services
We present a novel bandwidth broker architecture for scalable support of guaranteed services that decouples the QoS control plane from the packet forwarding plane. More specifically, under this architecture, core routers do not maintain any QoS reservation states, whether per-flow or aggregate. Instead, the QoS reservation states are stored at and managed by a bandwidth broker. There are several advantages of such a bandwidth broker architecture. Among others, it avoids the problem of inconsistent QoS states faced by the conventional hop-by-hop, distributed admission control approach. Furthermore, it allows us to design efficient admission control algorithms without incurring any overhead at core routers. The proposed bandwidth broker architecture is designed based on a core stateless virtual time reference system developed recently. This virtual time reference system provides a unifying framework to characterize, in terms of their abilities to support delay guarantees, both the per-hop behaviors of core routers and the end-to-end properties of their concatenation. We focus on the design of efficient admission control algorithms under the proposed bandwidth broker architecture. We consider both per-flow end-to-end guaranteed delay services and class-based guaranteed delay services with flow aggregation. Using our bandwidth broker architecture, we demonstrate how admission control can be done on a per domain basis instead of on a "hop-by-hop" basis. Such an approach may significantly reduce the complexity of the admission control algorithms. In designing class-based admission control algorithms, we investigate the problem of dynamic flow aggregation in providing guaranteed delay services and devise a new apparatus to effectively circumvent this problem. We conduct detailed analyses to provide theoretical underpinning for our schemes as well as to establish their correctness. Simulations are also performed to demonstrate the efficacy of our schemes.
33893889
Supporting stored video: reducing rate variability and end-to-end resource requirements through optimal smoothing
Variable-bit-rate (VBR) compressed video can exhibit significant multiple-time-scale bit-rate variability. In this paper we consider the transmission of stored video from a server to a client across a network, and explore how the client buffer space can be used most effectively toward reducing the variability of the transmitted bit rate. Two basic results are presented. First, we show how to achieve the greatest possible reduction in rate variability when sending stored video to a client with given buffer size. We formally establish the optimality of our approach and illustrate its performance over a set of long MPEG-1 encoded video traces. Second, we evaluate the impact of optimal smoothing on the network resources needed for video transport, under two network service models: deterministic guaranteed service (Chang 1994; Wrege et al. 1996) and renegotiated constant-bit-rate (RCBR) service (Grossglauser et al. 1997). Under both models, the impact of optimal smoothing is dramatic.
5876943
Adaptive packet sampling for flow volume measurement
Traffic measurement and monitoring are an important component of network management and traffic engineering. With high-speed Internet backbone links, efficient and effective packet sampling techniques for traffic measurement and monitoring are not only desirable, but also increasingly becoming a necessity. Since the utility of sampling depends on the accuracy and economy of measurement, it is important to control sampling error. In this paper we propose and analyze an adaptive, stratified random packet sampling technique for flow-level traffic measurement. In particular, we address the theoretical and practical issues involved. Through theoretical studies and experiments, we demonstrate that the proposed sampling technique provides unbiased estimation of flow size with controllable error bound, in terms of both packet and byte counts for elephant flows, while avoiding excessive oversampling.
770365
Robust head motion computation by taking advantage of physical properties
Head motion determination is an important problem for many applications including face modeling and tracking. We present a new algorithm to compute the head motion between two views from the correspondences of five feature points (eye corners, mouth corners and nose tip), and zero or more additional image point matches. The algorithm takes advantage of the physical properties of the feature points, such as symmetry, and it significantly improves the robustness of head motion estimation. This is achieved by reducing the number of unknowns to be estimated, thus increasing information redundancy. This idea can be easily extended to any number of feature point correspondences.
6709890
An agent-based hybrid framework for database mining
While knowledge discovery in databases (KDD) is defined as an iterative sequence of the following steps: data pre-processing, data mining, and post data mining, a significant amount of research in data mining has been done, resulting in a variety of algorithms and techniques for each step. However, a single data-mining technique has not been proven appropriate for every domain and data set. Instead, several techniques may need to be integrated into hybrid systems and used cooperatively during a particular data-mining operation. That is, hybrid solutions are crucial for the success of data mining. This paper presents a hybrid framework for identifying patterns from databases or multi-databases. The framework integrates these techniques for mining tasks from an agent point of view. Based on the experiments conducted, putting different KDD techniques together into the agent-based architecture enables them to be used cooperatively when needed. The proposed framework provides a highly flexible and robust data-mining platform and the resulting systems demonstrate emergent behaviors although it does not improve the performance of individual KDD techniques.
14894499
Extraction of a source signal whose kurtosis value lies in a specific range
In many applications extraction of source signals of interest from observed signals is a more feasible approach than simultaneous separation of all the source signals, since the latter often costs lots of computing time and often is not necessary. If the desired source signals have some specific properties, then we can exploit these properties to design effective source extraction algorithms. This letter proposes an algorithm, which extracts the desired signal with a priori knowledge about its statistics. That is to say, if we know the range in which the kurtosis value of the desired signal lies, we can use this algorithm to extract it. The validity and performance of the proposed approach are confirmed through computer simulations and experiments on real-world ECG data.
2128570
Peer-to-peer based multimedia distribution service
Recently, there are many research interests in providing efficient and scalable multimedia distribution service. However, stringent quality-of-service (QoS) requirements for media distribution, as well as dynamically changing and heterogeneous network capacity in today's best effort Internet, bring many challenges. In this paper, we introduce a novel framework for multimedia distribution service based on peer-to-peer (P2P) networks. A topology-aware overlay is proposed in which hosts self-organize into groups. End hosts within the same group have similar network conditions and can easily collaborate with each other to achieve QoS awareness. In order to improve media delivery quality and provide high service availability, we further propose two distributed heuristic replication strategies, intergroup replication and intragroup replication, based on this topology-aware overlay. Specifically, intergroup replication is aimed to improve the efficiency of media content delivery between the group where a request is issued and the group where the content is stored. Also, intragroup replication is targeted at improving the availability of the content. Extensive simulation results show that the latency in our proposed architecture is 20% less than that of the FreeNet and 50% less than that of the randomly replication system. Simulation results also show that the video quality in our system is much better than that in the other two systems. Our P2P-based approach is also distributed, scalable, cost effective, and aware of the performance.
6801587
Performance analysis of k-fold multicast networks
Multicast involves transmitting information from a single source to multiple destinations, and is an important operation in high-performance networks. A k-fold multicast network was recently proposed as a cost-effective solution to providing better quality-of-service functions in supporting real-world multicast applications. To give a quantitative basis for network designers to determine the suitable value of system parameter k under different traffic loads, in this paper, we propose an analytical model for the performance of k-fold multicast networks under Poisson traffic. We first give the stationary distribution of network states, and then derive the throughput and blocking probability of the network. We also conduct extensive simulations to validate the analytical model, and the results show that the analytical model is very accurate under the assumptions made. The analytical and simulation results reveal that by increasing the fold of the network, network throughput increases very fast when the fanouts of multicast connections are relatively small, compared with the network size.