14253908
Proactive vs reactive approaches to failure resilient routing
Dealing with network failures effectively is a major operational challenge for Internet service providers. Commonly deployed link state routing protocols such as OSPF react to link failures through global (i.e., network-wide) link state advertisements and routing table recomputations, causing significant forwarding discontinuity after a failure. The drawback with these protocols is that they need to trade off routing stability and forwarding continuity. To improve failure resiliency without jeopardizing routing stability, we propose a proactive local rerouting based approach called failure insensitive routing (FIR). The proposed approach prepares for failures using interface-specific forwarding, and upon a failure, suppresses the link state advertisement and instead triggers local rerouting using a backwarding table. In this paper, we prove that when no more than one link failure notification is suppressed, FIR always finds a loop-free path to a destination if one such path exists. We also formally analyze routing stability and network availability under both proactive and reactive approaches, and show that FIR provides better stability and availability than OSPF.
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.
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.
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.
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.
30449072
Defining Components in a MetaCASE Environment
In this paper we describe how to improve method reusability in a metaCASE environment called MetaEdit+. The suggested component based approach helps unify design artefacts into components with explicit interfaces and meaningful context descriptions. We describe a method artefact from three perspectives: concept, content, and context. We create a component concept by using a hierarchical facet-based schema, and represent contextual relationship types by using definitional and reuse dependency, usage context, and implementation context links. This is the first attempt to explicitly define components into a metaCASE environment.
1937169
Camera calibration with one-dimensional objects
Camera calibration has been studied extensively in computer vision and photogrammetry and the proposed techniques in the literature include those using 3D apparatus (two or three planes orthogonal to each other or a plane undergoing a pure translation, etc.), 2D objects (planar patterns undergoing unknown motions), and 0D features (self-calibration using unknown scene points). Yet, the paper proposes a new calibration technique using 1D objects (points aligned on a line), thus filling the missing dimension in calibration. In particular, we show that camera calibration is not possible with free-moving 1D objects, but can be solved if one point is fixed. A closed-form solution is developed if six or more observations of such a 1D object are made. For higher accuracy, a nonlinear technique based on the maximum likelihood criterion is then used to refine the estimate. Singularities have also been studied. Besides the theoretical aspect, the proposed technique is also important in practice especially when calibrating multiple cameras mounted apart from each other, where the calibration objects are required to be visible simultaneously.
17015903
Optimal scheduling in buffered WDM interconnects with limited range wavelength conversion capability
All optical networking is a promising candidate for supporting high-speed communications because of the huge bandwidth of optics. In this paper, we study optimal scheduling in buffered WDM interconnects with limited range wavelength conversion capability. We formalize the problem of maximizing network throughput and minimizing total delay as a problem of finding an optimal matching in a weighted bipartite graph. We then give a simple algorithm, called the Scan and Swap Algorithm, that finds the optimal matching in O(kB) time, where k is the number of wavelengths per fiber and B is the buffer length, as compared to directly adopting other existing algorithms that need at least O(k/sup 2/N/sup 2/ + k/sup 2/BN) time, where N is the number of input fibers.
5700504
Localized algorithm for aggregate fairness in wireless sensor networks
For data-collection applications in sensor networks, it is important to ensure all data sources have equal (or weighted) access to network bandwidth so that the base stations receive a complete picture about the monitored area. We point out the fairness problem in the current design of sensor networks, which may cause extremely biased bandwidth allocations. It is a challenge to design a fully distributed fairness solution due to the lack of global knowledge about the distribution of data sources and their routing paths. This paper proposes a new aggregate fairness model and a localized algorithm (called AFA) that implements the model. AFA is designed to work with any routing protocol. In particular, it allows the packets from a data source to follow an arbitrary set of forwarding paths to the base stations. This flexibility makes it considerably harder to allocate bandwidth fairly among different data sources. AFA solves the problem with only localized operations at the sensors. It is easy to implement, which is an attractive property for sensor networks. Moreover, the algorithm automatically adjusts a sensor's forwarding rate to avoid packet drops due to downstream congestion, which helps improve energy efficiency. We perform extensive simulations, demonstrating that the proposed algorithm can effectively improve end-to-end fairness.
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.