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.
12875295
A comparison of multicast feedback control mechanisms
In reliable multicast applications, packet loss needs to be reported by having group members send feedback messages. This results in the well-known feedback implosion problem. The available feedback control mechanisms can be classified as timer-based, hierarchy-based and router-assisted, among which the timer-based approach is more preferable due to its simplicity and flexibility. This paper compares the performance of a set of multicast protocols that use either the traditional timer-based feedback control or a combination of the traditional timers and some representatives in the feedback control. We investigate how the use of representatives and deterministic timers improves feedback control performance.
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.
12036050
A Dynamic Manifestation Approach for Providing Universal Access to Digital Library Objects
Digital libraries are concerned with the creation and management of information sources, the movement of information across global networks, and the effective use of this information by a wide range of users. A digital library is a vast collection of objects that are of multimedia nature, e.g. text, video, images, and audio. Users wishing to access the digital library objects may possess varying capabilities, preferences, domain expertise, and may use different information appliances. Facilitating access to complex multimedia digital library objects that suits the users' requirements is known as universal access. We present an object manifestation approach in which digital library objects automatically manifest themselves to cater to the users' capabilities and characteristics. We provide a formal framework, based on Petri nets, to represent the various components of the digital library objects, their modality and fidelity, and the playback synchronization relationships among them. We develop methodologies for object delivery without any deadtime under network delays.
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.
21336774
An Adapted Lesk Algorithm for Word Sense Disambiguation Using WordNet
This paper presents an adaptation of Lesk's dictionary-based word sense disambiguation algorithm. Rather than using a standard dictionary as the source of glosses for our approach, the lexical database WordNet is employed. This provides a rich hierarchy of semantic relations that our algorithm can exploit. This method is evaluated using the English lexical sample data from the SENSEVAL-2 word sense disambiguation exercise, and attains an overall accuracy of 32%. This represents a significant improvement over the 16% and 23% accuracy attained by variations of the Lesk algorithm used as benchmarks during the Senseval-2 comparative exercise among word sense disambiguation systems.
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>>
22414487
On the Effectiveness of Flow Aggregation in Improving Instruction Reuse in Network Processing Applications
Instruction Reuse is a microarchitectural technique that exploits dynamic instruction repetition to remove redundant computations at run-time. In this paper we examine instruction reuse of integer ALU and load instructions in network processing applications and attempt to answer the following questions: (1) How much of instruction repetition can be reused in packet processing applications?, (2) Can the temporal locality of network traffic be exploited to reduce interference in the Reuse Buffer and improve reuse? and (3) What is the effect of reuse on microarchitectural features such as resource contention and memory accesses? We use an execution driven simulation methodology to evaluate instruction reuse and find that for the benchmarks considered, 1 to 50% of the dynamic instructions are reused yielding performance improvement between 1 and 20%. To further improve reuse, a flow aggregation scheme as well as an architecture for exploiting the same is proposed. This scheme is mostly applicable to header processing applications and exploits temporal locality in packet data to uncover higher reuse. As a side effect, instruction reuse reduces memory traffic and improves performance.
16504925
Debugging DHCP performance
Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) was defined to facilitate automatic configuration of IP addresses and other network parameters to hosts in a network. Efficiency of DHCP's address management is especially important today in part due to proliferation of mobile devices with transient network access patterns and the consequent increased demand on transient IP addresses in open-access networks. Unfortunately, DHCP's flexible design makes it susceptible to a variety of misconfigurations. The focus of this work is, therefore, to evaluate the performance and vulnerabilities of DHCP in operational networks today. To this end, we developed a tool called DHCP-Watch that facilitates DHCP-related network debugging and enables better capacity planning. We used this tool to perform a first-of-its-kind detailed measurement study of DHCP performance in operational university campus networks. Our measurements revealed various trends of IP address usage. Additionally, we discovered frequent anomalous operations due to network misconfigurations and presence of misbehaving hosts.
3351438
Scalable application layer multicast
We describe a new scalable application-layer multicast protocol, specifically designed for low-bandwidth, data streaming applications with large receiver sets. Our scheme is based upon a hierarchical clustering of the application-layer multicast peers and can support a number of different data delivery trees with desirable properties.We present extensive simulations of both our protocol and the Narada application-layer multicast protocol over Internet-like topologies. Our results show that for groups of size 32 or more, our protocol has lower link stress (by about 25%), improved or similar end-to-end latencies and similar failure recovery properties. More importantly, it is able to achieve these results by using orders of magnitude lower control traffic.Finally, we present results from our wide-area testbed in which we experimented with 32-100 member groups distributed over 8 different sites. In our experiments, average group members established and maintained low-latency paths and incurred a maximum packet loss rate of less than 1% as members randomly joined and left the multicast group. The average control overhead during our experiments was less than 1 Kbps for groups of size 100.