17891154
A Credit-Based Active Queue Management (AQM) Mechanism to Achieve Fairness in the Internet
Router-based algorithms to address the TCP-friendliness problem have focused on providing fairness to TCP connections by penalizing UDP unresponsive flows. As a result, current schemes have overlooked their effect on streaming applications. In addition, current schemes have not been widely implemented in practice because of their high complexity and their inability to provide fairness when multiple unresponsive flows, packets of different sizes, and bursty traffic are present. All these aspects and scenarios, commonly found in practice, are rarely addressed in the literature. In this paper, we present Achieving Fairness using a Credit-based mechanism or AFC, a simple Fair Active Queue Management (FAQM) mechanism that aims to solve the unfairness problems generated under these realistic conditions. Simulation results show that AFC provides smoother transfer rates for unresponsive flows transmitting real-time traffic, handles multiple heavy unresponsive flows better, improves the fairness among TCP connections with different round-trip delays, and achieves good fairness even under bursty traffic and packets of different sizes.
30095382
Performance Analysis of Generalized Selective Packet Discarding Schemes
Selective packet discarding schemes have been mostly developed and analyzed in the context of ATM networks. However, similar schemes could be applied to non-ATM or more general networks. The analysis of selective packet discarding schemes in a general packet switching environment has been limited to the basic dropping schemes, i.e., Partial Packet Discard (PPD) and Early Packet Discard (EPD), and for only the single traffic source case. In this paper, we extend the mathematical analysis of PPD and EPD for multiple sources and include simulation results to verify the analytical results. Finally, to place the performance of the generalized EPD and PPD in the context of other packet dropping schemes, we also provide simulation results of the Drop from Front (DfF), and preemptive Partial Packet Discard (pPPD) schemes.
13442653
Establishing virtual enterprises by means of mobile agents
Electronic commerce is expanding from the simple notion of electronic stores to the notion of virtual enterprises (VE), where existing enterprises dynamically form temporary alliances, joining their businesses in order to share their costs, skills and resources in supporting certain activities. Two fundamental problems in VE are: (1) how a VE is established, and (2) how information is shared among the VE participants in a controlled and efficient manner. Currently, existing enterprises are using workflows to automate their operations by integrating their information systems and human resources. Thus, in this paper, we view the establishment of a VE as a problem of dynamically expanding and integrating workflows in decentralized, autonomous and interacting workflow management systems. The focus is on the idea of mobile agents called "adlets" and their use in establishing VEs that involves advertising, negotiating and exchanging control information and data as well as its management.
25726525
A survey of TCP-friendly router-based AQM schemes
Although the majority of the traffic over the Internet is still TCP-based, applications such as voice over IP and video-conferencing are changing this very rapidly. While TCP-based applications react to network congestion, UDP-based streaming applications usually do not have any type of flow and congestion control mechanisms. UDP, the transport layer protocol used by audio and video streaming applications, does not react to network congestion thus stealing bandwidth from the responsive TCP-based connections. Several solutions have been suggested to combat this TCP-friendliness problem, mostly applied either in the end systems (end-to-end) at the transport layer of the protocol stack or inside the network (routers) at the network layer. This article surveys the state-of-the-art in router-based mechanisms to address the TCP-friendliness problem and presents a description of the most important algorithms, design issues, advantages and disadvantages, and a performance evaluation. The article also describes ways to estimate the number of active flows traversing a core router and points to further sources on this subject, which is widely used by many mechanisms, including several described in this survey.
14976055
A new token passing distributed mutual exclusion algorithm
Eliminating interference between concurrently executing activities through mutual exclusion is one of the most fundamental problems in computer systems. The problem of mutual exclusion in a distributed system is especially interesting owing to the lack of global knowledge in the presence of variable communication delays. In this paper, a new token-based distributed mutual exclusion algorithm is proposed. The algorithm incurs approximately three messages at high loads, irrespective of the number of nodes N in the system. At low loads, it requires approximately N messages. The paper also addresses failure recovery issues, such as token loss.
40446138
A distributed hierarchical management framework for heterogeneous WANs
The scope of network management is expanding in multiple dimensions. Local area networks (LANs) have more nodes than ever before, enterprise networks span national boundaries, wide area networks (WANs) cover the globe, and administrators want to manage their LANs all the way down to a PC’s network interface and application software. In order to centrally manage these networks, the network manager faces the complexity of heterogeneous management tools and the difficulty of managing vast amount of data generated by network elements.
3090624
Eliminating handoff latencies in 802.11 WLANs using multiple radios: applications, experience, and evaluation
Deployment of Voice-over IP (VoIP) and other real-time streaming applications has been somewhat limited in wireless LANs today, partially because of the high handoff latencies experienced by mobile users. Our goal in this work is to eliminate handoff latency by exploiting the potential of multiple radios in WLAN devices. Our proposed approach, called MultiScan, is implemented entirely on the client-side, and, unlike prior work, MultiScan requires neither changing the Access Points (APs), nor having knowledge of wireless network topology. MultiScan nodes rely on using their (potentially idle) second wireless interface to opportunistically scan and pre-associate with alternate APs and eventually seamlessly handoff ongoing connections. In this paper we describe our implementation of MultiScan, present detailed evaluations of its effect on handoff latency and evaluate performance gains for MultiScan-enhanced wireless clients running Skype, a popular commercial VoIP application.
206616812
The Design, Implementation, and Use of the Ngram Statistics Package
The Ngram Statistics Package (NSP) is a flexible and easy-to-use software tool that supports the identification and analysis of Ngrams, sequences of N tokens in online text. We have designed and implemented NSP to be easy to customize to particular problems and yet remain general enough to serve a broad range of needs. This paper provides an introduction to NSP while raising some general issues in Ngram analysis, and summarizes several applications where NSP has been successfully employed. NSP is written in Perl and is freely available under the GNU Public License.
8584874
Throughput Optimization and Fair Bandwidth Allocation in Multi-Hop Wireless LANs
There is an inherent well-known conflict between fairness and throughput that arises in many networking scenarios. A number of researchers have studied this problem in the context of (single-hop) wireless local area networks (WLANs), where clients directly exchange traffic with access points (APs). More recently, researchers have proposed multi-hop extensions to WLANs where client traffic is forwarded via a series of client-client links. In this paper, we show that the objective of improving throughput without sacrificing fairness can be much better met in multi-hop WLANs. We decouple this objective into two separate but related problems. First, we need an algorithm to organize clients into a multi-hop structure such that fair bandwidth allocation within this structure leads to improved throughput. Second, we need algorithms for performing fair bandwidth allocation within the determined multi-hop structure. In this paper, we first design optimal fair bandwidth allocation algorithms for both max-min throughput fairness and max-min time fairness in multi-hop WLANs. Subsequently, we design an efficient algorithm to find desirable multi-hop structures. With slight modifications, our results in this paper can be generalized to other multi-hop wireless networks as well. Our proposed solutions seamlessly integrate with legacy devices and hence are incrementally deployable. Simulation results demonstrate that our solutions can effectively improve throughput (by up to 114% or more) as well as network coverage while preserving fairness.
135907
Minimum energy reliable paths using unreliable wireless links
We address the problem of energy-efficient reliable wireless communication in the presence of unreliable or lossy wireless link layers in multi-hop wireless networks. Prior work [1] has provided an optimal energy efficient solution to this problem for the case where link layers implement perfect reliability. However, a more common scenario --- a link layer that is not perfectly reliable, was left as an open problem. In this paper we first present two centralized algorithms, BAMER and GAMER, that optimally solve the minimum energy reliable communication problem in presence of unreliable links. Subsequently we present a distributed algorithm, DAMER, that approximates the performance of the centralized algorithm and leads to significant performance improvement over existing single-path or multi-path based techniques.
2759775
Distributed channel management in uncoordinated wireless environments
Wireless 802.11 hotspots have grown in an uncoordinated fashion with highly variable deployment densities. Such uncoordinated deployments, coupled with the difficulty of implementing coordination protocols, has often led to conflicting configurations (e.g., in choice of transmission power and channel of operation) among the corresponding Access Points (APs). Overall, such conflicts cause both unpredictable network performance and unfairness among clients of neighboring hotspots. In this paper, we focus on the fairness problem for uncoordinated deployments. We study this problem from the channel assignment perspective. Our solution is based on the notion of channel-hopping, and meets all the important design considerations for control methods in uncoordinated deployments - distributed in nature, minimal to zero coordination among APs belonging to different hotspots, simple to implement, and interoperable with existing standards. In particular, we propose a specific algorithm called MAXchop, which works efficiently when using only non-overlapping wireless channels, but is particularly effective in exploiting partially-overlapped channels that have been proposed in recent literature. We also evaluate how our channel assignment approach complements previously proposed carrier sensing techniques in providing further performance improvements. Through extensive simulations on real hotspot topologies and evaluation of a full implementation of this technique, we demonstrate the efficacy of these techniques for not only fairness, but also the aggregate throughput, metrics.We believe that this is the first work that brings into focus the fairness properties of channel hopping techniques and we hope that the insights from this research will be applied to other domains where a fair division of a system's resources is an important consideration.