14357613
Construction of an efficient overlay multicast infrastructure for real-time applications
This paper presents an overlay architecture where service providers deploy a set of service nodes (called MSNs) in the network to efficiently implement media-streaming applications. These MSNs are organized into an overlay and act as application-layer multicast forwarding entities for a set of clients. We present a decentralized scheme that organizes the MSNs into an appropriate overlay structure that is particularly beneficial for real-time applications. We formulate our optimization criterion as a "degree-constrained minimum average-latency problem" which is known to be NP-hard. A key feature of this formulation is that it gives a dynamic priority to different MSNs based on the size of its service set. Our proposed approach iteratively modifies the overlay tree using localized transformations to adapt with changing distribution of MSNs, clients, as well as network conditions. We show that a centralized greedy approach to this problem does not perform quite as well, while our distributed iterative scheme efficiently converges to near-optimal solutions.
3056111
An Analysis of Wireless Network Coding for Unicast Sessions: The Case for Coding-Aware Routing
A recent approach, COPE, for improving the throughput of unicast traffic in wireless multi-hop networks exploits the broadcast nature of the wireless medium through opportunistic network coding. In this paper, we analyze throughput improvements obtained by COPE-type network coding in wireless networks from a theoretical perspective. We make two key contributions. First, we obtain a theoretical formulation for computing the throughput of network coding on any wireless network topology and any pattern of concurrent unicast traffic sessions. Second, we advocate that routing be made aware of network coding opportunities rather than, as in COPE, being oblivious to it. More importantly, our work studies the tradeoff between routing flows "close to each other" for utilizing coding opportunities and "away from each other" for avoiding wireless interference. Our theoretical formulation provides a method for computing source-destination routes and utilizing the best coding opportunities from available ones so as to maximize the throughput. We handle scheduling of broadcast transmissions subject to wireless transmit/receive diversity and link interference in our optimization framework. Using our formulations, we compare the performance of traditional unicast routing and network coding with coding-oblivious and coding-aware routing on a variety of mesh network topologies, including some derived from contemporary mesh network testbeds. Our evaluations show that a route selection strategy that is aware of network coding opportunities leads to higher end-to-end throughput when compared to coding-oblivious routing strategies.
15760
Energy-Efficient Reliable Paths for On-Demand Routing Protocols
We define techniques to compute energy-efficient reliable paths within the framework of on-demand routing protocols. The choice of energy-efficient reliable paths depend on link error rates on different wireless links, which in turn depend on channel noise. We show how our scheme accounts for such channel characteristics in computing such paths. Additionally, we perform a detailed study of the AODV protocol and our energy-efficient variants, under various noise and node mobility conditions. Our results show that our proposed variants of on-demand routing protocols can achieve orders of magnitude improvement in energy-efficiency of reliable data paths.
14498501
A clustering scheme for hierarchical control in multi-hop wireless networks
In this paper we present a clustering scheme to create a hierarchical control structure for multi-hop wireless networks. A cluster is defined as a subset of vertices, whose induced graph is connected. In addition, a cluster is required to obey certain constraints that are useful for management and scalability of the hierarchy. All these constraints cannot be met simultaneously for general graphs, but we show how such a clustering can be obtained for wireless network topologies. Finally, we present an efficient distributed implementation of our clustering algorithm for a set of wireless nodes to create the set of desired clusters.
2626768
MAR: a commuter router infrastructure for the mobile Internet
We introduce MAR, a commuter mobile access router infrastructure that exploits wireless diversity (e.g. channel diversity, network diversity, and technology diversity) to provide improved data performance for wireless data users. Our system design stems from the observation that rather than choosing a single wireless service provider (e.g. Sprint, AT&T, BT, Vodafone), a single technology (e.g. GPRS, UMTS, CDMA, 802.11), or a single wireless channel, users can obtain significant benefits by using the multiplicity of choices available. MAR is a wireless multi-homed device that can be placed in moving vehicles (e.g. car, bus, train) to enable high-speed data access. MAR dynamically instantiates new channels based on traffic demand, aggregates the bandwidth and dynamically shifts load from poor quality to better quality channels. MAR, thus, provides a faster, more stable, and reliable communication channel to mobile users.We have implemented and tested the MAR system in our testbed which spans the networks of three different cellular providers. Through our experiments we have performed a detailed evaluation to quantify the benefits of MAR for different protocols and applications. For example, even in highly mobile environments, MAR, on average, improves the end-user experience of web-browsing and streaming applications by a factor of 2.8 and 4.4 respectively. Our results show that significant benefits can be obtained by exploiting the diversity in coverage offered by many cellular operators, different technology networks (e.g. GPRS, CDMA), and diverse wireless channels.
7316736
Efficient probabilistic packet marking
Probabilistic packet marking is a general technique which routers can use to reveal internal network information to end-hosts. Such information is probabilistically set by the routers in headers of regular IP packets on their way to destinations. A number of potential applications have been identified, such as IP traceback, congestion control, robust routing algorithms, dynamic network reconfiguration, and locating Internet bottlenecks, etc. In this paper, we define EPPM, an efficient general probabilistic packet marking scheme with a wide range of potential applications, of which locating Internet bottlenecks and IP traceback are investigated as two representative examples to demonstrate its effectiveness. Our proposed scheme imposes only a single-bit overhead in the IP packet headers. More importantly, it significantly reduces the number of IP packets required to convey the relevant information when compared to the prior best known scheme (almost by two orders of magnitude)
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.
16981937
Network traffic characterization of distributed database applications
The authors' efforts in characterizing the traffic of distributed database systems are described. This is an important class of applications considering that database or transaction processing systems form the core of several key commercial applications. Specific traffic source models for this application class have not been developed which is imperative for their successful deployment in emerging networks. The main contribution of the paper is to present the relationship between a distributed database application scenario and the corresponding network traffic characteristics, thus providing guidelines to these applications to compute their traffic descriptors accurately.
13275687
Exploiting program execution phases to trade power and performance for media workload
Processing streaming media comprises several program phases (often distinct) that are periodic and independent of application data. In this paper we characterize execution of such programs into execution phases based on their dynamic IPC (Instruction Per Cycle) profile. We show that program execution of selected phases can be dynamically boosted by activating additional standby functional units which ae otherwise powered down for saving energy. Through simulation we show that speedup ranging from 1.1 to 1.25 can be achieved while reducing the energy-delay product (EDP) for most of the media benchmarks evaluated. Additionally we show that artificially introduced stalls during phases of processor underutilization reduces power by around 2 to 4%.
17465088
An efficient channel-feedback-based adaptive protocol for scheduling variable-length messages on slotted, high-speed fiber optic LANs/MANs
This paper is based on the continuation-bit approach in conjunction with a probabilistic scheduling strategy called the p/sub i/-persistent protocol. This combination has been proposed as an efficient multiple access protocol for transmitting variable-length messages on slotted, high-speed, fiber-optic, bus-structured local and metropolitan area networks (LANs/MANs). Specifically, the authors extend the previous static model on this approach to the dynamic case so that the protocol can be implemented. A dynamic simulation model of the protocol using the continuation-bit approach has been formulated, and channel feedback information has been used to calibrate the operating parameters in real time. Since the goal was to study the operation of the dynamic protocol with variable-length messages, variable-bit-rate coded (i.e., compressed) video was chosen as the traffic to be carried by the network in the illustrative examples. The simulation model indicates that channel feedback is a good approach for dynamically adjusting the network parameters as the network loading and the message lengths fluctuate. Even at a network utilization of 0.6, it was found that almost all video messages were transmitted from the station buffers before the next video message arrived.<<ETX>>
31501132
Optical switch configuration and lightpath assignment in wavelength routing multihop lightwave networks
A wide-area transparent optical network can be constructed by using wavelength routers and switches, each dealing with only a small number of wavelengths. In this work we consider the problem of configuring the wavelength routers based on the observed traffic. Various policies for wavelength routing, and the corresponding assignment of wavelengths along the routes have been studied before, which are based on minimizing congestion, average hop-distance, and call blocking probability or on maximizing carried traffic, and the number of clear channels. However these approaches often lead to scenarios where a significant number of available wavelengths at the input/output ports of the routers cannot be used due to potential wavelength conflict. The wavelength routing and assignment algorithms presented in this paper focus on maximizing the wavelength-utilization at the switching devices which also improve the overall network performance.