Intelligent QoS management for multimedia services support in wireless mobile ad hoc networks

In this paper, we propose a new intelligent cross-layer QoS support for wireless mobile ad hoc networks. The solution, named FuzzyQoS, exploits fuzzy logic for improving traffic regulation and the control of congestion to support both real-time multimedia (audio/video) services and non-real-time traffic services. FuzzyQoS includes three contributions: (1) a fuzzy logic approach for best-effort traffic regulation (FuzzyQoS-1), (2) a new fuzzy Petri nets technique (FuzzyQoS-2) for modeling and analyzing the QoS decision making for traffic regulation control, and (3) a fuzzy logic approach for threshold buffer management (FuzzyQoS-3). In FuzzyQoS-1, the feedback delay information received from the network is used to perform a fuzzy regulation for best-effort traffic. Using fuzzy logic, FuzzyQoS-3 uses fuzzy thresholds to adapt to the dynamic conditions. The evaluation of FuzzyQoS performances was studied under different mobility, channel, and traffic conditions. The results of simulations confirm that a cross layer design using fuzzy logic at different levels can achieve low and stable end-to-end delay, and high throughput under different network conditions. These results will benefit delay- and jitter-sensitive real-time services.     

Multi-sink load balanced forwarding with a multi-criteria fuzzy sink selection for video sensor networks

Congestion is a challenging problem in wireless sensor networks, which exacerbates with the high volume of data traffic imposed by video applications such as video surveillance and target tracking. Deployment of multiple sinks is a candidate solution for congestion and is also promising in terms of reliability and energy-efficiency. In order to gain the maximum benefit from multiple sinks, it is essential to distribute the load among them evenly. In this paper, we propose a cross layer geographic forwarding scheme MLBRF (Multi-Sink Load Balanced Reliable Forwarding) which aims to provide reliable and energy efficient video delivery in a multi-sinked sensor network for target tracking. In order to provide load balancing among the sinks, MLBRF proposes a sink selection mechanism based on fuzzy logic for the frame forwarding which evaluates the traffic density in the direction of each sink by combining two dynamic criteria which are the number of contenders and the buffer occupancy levels in the neighborhood with the static distance criterion. The performance of the fuzzy sink selection mechanism is compared using simulation with various sink selection mechanisms. The results show that MLBRF gains the maximum benefit from deploying multiple sinks in terms of reliability, latency and energy efficiency by using the proposed fuzzy sink selection mechanism.     

Fuzzy-based rate control for real-time MPEG video

We propose a fuzzy logic-based control scheme for real-time motion picture expert group (MPEG) video to avoid long delay or excessive loss at the user-network interface (UNI) in an asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) network. The system consists of a shaper whose role is to smooth the MPEG output traffic to reduce the burstiness of the video stream. The input and output rates of the shaper buffer are controlled by two fuzzy logic-based controllers. To avoid a long delay at the shaper, the first controller aims to tune the output rate of the shaper in the video frame time scale based on the number of available transmission credits at the UNI and the occupancy of the shaper's buffer. Based on the average occupancy of the shaper's buffer and its variance, the second controller tunes the input rate to the shaper over a much larger time scale by applying a closed-loop MPEG encoding scheme. With this approach, the traffic enters the network at an almost constant bit rate (with a very small variation) allowing simple network management functions such as admission control and bandwidth allocation, while guaranteeing a relatively constant video quality since the encoding rate is changed only in critical periods when the shaper buffer “threatens” to overflow. The performance of the proposed scheme is evaluated through numerical tests on real video sequences     

ATM网络流量控制中的一种信元丢弃机制

ATM论坛将基于速率的流量控制选定为ABR业务的流量控制方法。通过对基于速率的流量控制和基于凭证的流量控制方法的研究,提出了一种信元丢弃流量控制原则,该模型继承了基于凭证方法的记数机制,通过设定高低缓存门限和调节速率升降因数来控制源端速率,仿真结果表明,这种控制机制不仅能够保证缓存的充分利用,而且能够提高其在减少信元丢失等方面的性能。     

Hardware implementation of dynamic fuzzy logic based routing in Network-on-Chip

This paper presents the hardware implementation of a generic fuzzy logic-based adaptive routing scheme for both buffered and bufferless Networks-on-Chip (NoC). The routing scheme considers the dynamic traffic load and power consumption on neighboring router links to select the output port of an incoming flit. Specifically, fuzzy logic control is used to build a simple, generic, and efficient nonlinear control law that dynamically calculates the input link cost. Basing the link cost on traffic load and power consumption and not on empty buffer slots, makes the proposed algorithm applicable to both buffered and bufferless NoCs. Hardware implementation in ASIC and FPGA technologies demonstrate that the hardware area overhead imposed by the fuzzy control logic is from minimal to negligible for practical flit sizes and scales excellently with network size. Furthermore, since the fuzzy control logic is not in the router critical path, it imposes no additional latency. Finally, we demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed routing scheme through simulative evaluation against representative conventional counterparts.     

Sequence-preserving parallel IP lookup using multiple SRAM-based pipelines

SRAM (static random access memory)-based pipelined algorithmic solutions have become competitive alternatives to TCAMs (ternary content addressable memories) for high-throughput IP lookup. Multiple pipelines can be utilized in parallel to improve the throughput further. However, several challenges must be addressed to make such solutions feasible. First, the memory distribution over different pipelines, as well as across different stages of each pipeline, must be balanced. Second, the traffic among these pipelines should be balanced. Third, the intra-flow packet order (i.e. the sequence) must be preserved. In this paper, we propose a parallel SRAM-based multi-pipeline architecture for IP lookup. A two-level mapping scheme is developed to balance the memory requirement among the pipelines as well as across the stages in each pipeline. To balance the traffic, we propose an early caching scheme to exploit the data locality inherent in the architecture. Our technique uses neither a large reorder buffer nor complex reorder logic. Instead, a flow-aware queuing scheme exploiting the flow information is used to maintain the intra-flow sequence. Extensive simulation using real-life traffic traces shows that the proposed architecture with 8 pipelines can achieve a throughput of up to 10 billion packets per second, i.e. 3.2 Tbps for minimum size (40 bytes) packets, while preserving intra-flow packet order.     

Congestion control based dynamic routing in ATM networks

In this paper we describe briefly a dynamic multi-path algorithm that has been considered for connection oriented asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) networks. Our scheme takes advantage of a cell multiplexing capability that has particular advantage in networks supporting variable bit rate (VBR) traffic. The fundamental objective of the scheme is to propose a congestion control based scheme that bridges the gap between routing and congestion control as the network becomes congested. The proposed routing scheme works as a shortest path first algorithm under light traffic conditions. However, as the shortest path becomes congested under unbalanced heavy traffic, the source uses multiple paths when and if available to distribute the calls and reduce cell loss. This mechanism will provide good Quality of Service for clients within the given constraints. We compare the performance of the proposed scheme with other competitive schemes. The throughput and cell loss performance are compared via simulations. These have been carried out concentrating on a five node network, each with varying traffic patterns, with the intention of gaining insight into the strengths and weaknesses of the various schemes.     

Efficient implementation of globally-aware network flow control

Network flow control mechanisms that are aware of global conditions potentially can achieve higher performance than flow control mechanisms that are only locally aware. Owing to high implementation overhead, globally-aware flow control mechanisms in their purest form are seldom adopted in practice, leading to less efficient simplified implementations. In this paper, we propose an efficient implementation of a globally-aware flow control mechanism, called Critical Bubble Scheme, for k-ary n-cube networks. This scheme achieves near-optimal performance with the same minimal buffer requirements of globally-aware flow control and can be further generalized to implement the general class of buffer occupancy-based network flow control. We prove deadlock freedom of the proposed scheme and exploit its use in handling protocol-induced deadlocks in on-chip environments. We evaluate the proposed scheme using both synthetic traffic and real application loads. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme can reduce the buffer access component of packet latency by as much as 62% over locally-aware flow control, and improve average packet latency by 18.8% and overall execution time by 7.2% in full system simulation.     

Differentiation, QoS guarantee, and optimization for real-time traffic over one-hop ad hoc networks

Nodes having a self-centrically broadcasting nature of communication form a wireless ad hoc network. Many issues are involved to provide quality of service (QoS) for ad hoc networks, including routing, medium access, resource reservation, mobility management, etc. Previous work mostly focuses on QoS routing with an assumption that the medium access control (MAC) layer can support QoS very well. However, contention-based MAC protocols are adopted in most ad hoc networks since there is no centralized control. QoS support in contention-based MAC layer is a very challenging issue. Carefully designed distributed medium access techniques must be used as foundations for most ad hoc networks. In this paper, we study and enhance distributed medium access techniques for real-time transmissions in the IEEE 802.11 single-hop ad hoc wireless networks. In the IEEE 802.11 MAC, error control adopts positive acknowledgement and retransmission to improve transmission reliability in the wireless medium (WM). However, for real-time multimedia traffic with sensitive delay requirements, retransmitted frames may be too late to be useful due to the fact that the delay of competing the WM is unpredictable. In this paper, we address several MAC issues and QoS issues for delay-sensitive real-time traffic. First, a priority scheme is proposed to differentiate the delay sensitive real-time traffic from the best-effort traffic. In the proposed priority scheme, retransmission is not used for the real-time traffic, and a smaller backoff window size is adopted. Second, we propose several schemes to guarantee QoS requirements. The first scheme is to guarantee frame-dropping probability for the real-time traffic. The second scheme is to guarantee throughput and delay. The last scheme is to guarantee throughput, delay, and frame-dropping probability simultaneously. Finally, we propose adaptive window backoff schemes to optimize throughput with and without QoS constraints.     

一种有效的同时多线程处理器取指控制机制

同时多线程处理器通过每时钟周期从多个运行的线程取指令执行,极大地提高了处理器的性能.分支预测器的预测精度和取指策略的效率是影响同时多线程处理器性能的关键.通过将一个基于值的分支预测器和一个基于线程推进速度的取指策略相结合,提出一种新的取指控制机制.该结构的硬件开销较小,实现复杂度较低.实验结果表明,该取指控制机制有效地提高了处理器的性能,其相对于传统取指控制机制的性能加速比为28%且该加速比也高于目前基于流缓冲区和基于分支分类器的取指控制机制.     

An integrated fuzzy-GA approach for buffer management

This paper deals with a novel buffer management scheme based on evolutionary computing for shared-memory asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) switches. The philosophy behind it is adaptation of the threshold for each logical output queue to the real traffic conditions by means of a system of fuzzy inferences. The optimal fuzzy system is achieved using a systematic methodology, based on genetic algorithms (GAs), which allows the fuzzy system parameters to be derived for each switch size, offering a high degree of scalability to the fuzzy control system. Its performance is comparable to that of the push-out (PO) mechanism, which can be considered ideal from a performance viewpoint, and at any rate much better than that of threshold schemes based on conventional logic. In addition, the fuzzy threshold (FT) scheme is simple and cost-effective when implemented using VLSI technology.     

Channel switching control policy for wireless mesh networks

Dynamic channel assignment algorithms allow wireless nodes to switch channels when their traffic loads exceed certain thresholds. These thresholds represent estimations of their throughput capacities. Unfortunately, the threshold estimation may not be accurate due to co-channel interference (CCI) and adjacent-channel interference (ACI), especially with high traffic loads in dense networks. When the link capacity is over-estimated, these channel assignment algorithms are not effective. This is because the channel switch is not triggered even with overloaded data traffic and the link quality decreases significantly as the channel is overloaded. When the link capacity is under-estimated, the link is under-utilized. Moreover, when link traffic load increases from time to time, channel switch occurs frequently. Such frequent channel switches increase latency and degrade throughput, and can even cause network wide channel oscillations. In this paper, we propose a novel threshold-based control system, called balanced control system (BCS). The proposed threshold-based control policy consists of deciding, according to the real time traffic load and interference, whether to switch to another channel, which channel should be switched to and how to perform the switch. Our control model is based on a fuzzy logic control. The threshold which assists to make the channel switch decisions, could be deduced dynamically according to the real-time traffic of each node. We also design a novel dynamic channel assignment scheme, which is used for the selection of the new channel. The channel switch scheduler is provided to perform channel-switch processing for sender and receiver over enhanced routing protocols. We implement our system in NS2, and the simulation results show that with our proposed system, the performance improves by 12.3%–72.8% in throughput and reduces 23.2%–52.3% in latency.     

具有拥塞缓解策略的动态虚拟通道研究及其VLSI实现

虚拟通道技术改善了片上网络性能,却带来了巨大的面积与功耗开销.通过分析静态虚拟通道的不足,提出了基于拥塞缓解策略的动态虚拟通道结构.它采用链表方式组织缓冲,可以自动调整通道结构来适应各种流量负载:在较低流量下,该结构扩展通道队列深度,减小了报文传输延迟;在较高流量下,它增加虚拟通道数量,消除队列头阻塞与通道不足阻塞,并缓解拥塞现象发生,减少流反馈次数,提高了网络吞吐率.在90nm CMOS工艺下完成了DVC路由器的VLSI设计,与传统路由器相比,不仅改善了报文传输延迟与吞吐率,而且有效降低了面积与功耗开销.     

Performance improvement of dynamic buffered ATM switch

Performance of ATM networks depends on switch performance and architecture. This paper presents a simulation study of a new dynamic allocation of input buffer space in ATM switching elements. The switching elements are composed of input and output buffers which are used to store received and forwarded cells, respectively. Efficient and fair use of buffer space in an ATM switch is essential to gain high throughput and low cell loss performance from the network. In this paper, input buffer space of each switching element is allocated dynamically as a function of traffic load. A shared buffer pool is provided with threshold-based virtual partition among input ports, which supplies the necessary input buffer space as required by each input port. The system behaviour under varying traffic loads has investigated using a simulation program. Also, a comparison with a static allocation scheme shows that the threshold based dynamic buffer allocation scheme ensures an increased network throughput and a fair share of the buffer space even under bursty loading conditions.     

Performance enhancement of TCP in high-speed networks

GridFTP is a secure and reliable high-performance parallel data transfer protocol used for transferring massive amounts of widely distributed data. Currently it allows users to configure the number of parallel streams and socket buffer size. However, its tuning procedure for optimal combination is a time consuming task. The socket handlers and buffers are important system resources and must therefore be carefully managed. In this paper, we propose a scheme to achieve high throughput even with a smaller buffer size, and also derive a regression equation to predict the optimal combination of resources for a connection. To improve the performance, the TCP based on our scheme obtains higher throughput and spends less memory for the same throughput than the original TCP scheme. In addition, the regression equation is verified by comparing measured and predicted values, and we apply the equation to an actual experiment on the KOrea advanced REsearch Network (KOREN). The result demonstrates that the equation provides excellent predictions with only an 8% error boundary.     

CICQ交换的流控实现机制和交叉点缓存容量分析

传统的基于crossbar的输入排队交换结构在提供良好的QOS方面存在很大的不足，而CICQ（combined input and crosspoint buffered queuing）交换结构与传统的交换结构相比，不但能在各种输入流下提供接近输出排队的吞吐率，而且能提供良好的QoS支持。文章分析了CICQ结构的流控实现机制，讨论了基于信用的流控机制的开销和实现方案，对crosspoint缓存容鼍作了分析，给出了在各种存储器写入条件下，保持交换结构100％吞吐率所需的最小缓存容量。     

An adaptive fuzzy model using orthonormal basis functions based on multifractal characteristics applied to network traffic control

In this paper, we present an adaptive predictive orthonormal basis functions (OBF)-fuzzy model that considers the multifractal behavior of network traffic flows. To this end, we model the traffic flows using orthonormal basis functions obtained through multifractal analysis. We insert the orthonormal basis functions into a fuzzy model trained with an adaptive clustering algorithm. Further, we propose a predictive flow control scheme for broadband networks. Also, using the fuzzy model parameters, we derive an expression for the optimal traffic source rate. Comparisons to other predictive control schemes prove the efficiency of the proposed adaptive OBF-fuzzy based control and training algorithm.     

Content-aware rate allocation for efficient video streaming via dynamic network utility maximization

Nowadays it is vital to design robust mechanisms to provide QoS for multimedia applications as an integral part of the network traffic. The main goal of this paper is to provide an efficient rate control scheme to support content-aware video transmission mechanism with buffer underflow avoidance at the receiver in congested networks. Towards this, we introduce a content-aware time-varying utility function, in which the quality impact of video content is incorporated into its mathematical expression. Moreover, we analytically model the buffer requirements of video sources in two ways: first as constraints of the optimization problem to guarantee a minimum rate demand for each source, and second as a penalty function embedded as part of the objective function attempting to achieve the highest possible rate for each source. Then, using the proposed analytical model, we formulate a dynamic network utility maximization problem, which aims to maximize the aggregate hybrid objective function of sources subject to capacity and buffer constraints. Finally, using primal–dual method, we solve DNUM problem and propose a distributed algorithm called CA-DNUM that optimally allocates the shared bandwidth to video streams. The experimental results demonstrate the efficacy and performance improvement of the proposed content-aware rate allocation algorithm for video sources in different scenarios.     

Optimization model for handoff-aware channel assignment problem for multi-radio wireless mesh networks

Optimal channel assignment (CA) in multi-radio wireless mesh networks is an NP-hard problem for which solutions usually leave several links interfering. Most of these solutions usually consider the overall throughput as the main optimization objective. However, other objectives have to be considered in order to provide better quality wireless connections to non stationary users. In this paper, we propose a multi-objective optimization model that, besides maximizing throughput, improves fairness and handoff experience of mesh clients. In this model, we use the Jain’s index to maximize users’ fairness and we allow same-channel assignments to links involved in the same high handoff traffic, thus reducing handoff-triggered re-routing characterized by its high latency. Then, we propose a centralized variable neighborhood search and a Tabu search heuristics to efficiently solve our model as an offline CA process. Moreover, in order to adapt to traffic dynamics caused especially by user handoffs, we propose an online CA scheme that carefully re-assigns channels to interfaces with the purpose of continuously minimizing the re-routing overhead/latency during user handoffs. We further improve this online scheme using load balancing. Simulation results show the good performance of our proposed approach in terms of delay, loss rate, overall throughput and fairness. Particularly, performance results of our online handoff-aware CA show the effectiveness of handoffs not involving path re-routing in decreasing the delay, especially when considering load balancing.     

On Sustained QoS Guarantees in Operated IEEE 802.11 Wireless LANs

Most of QoS-capable IEEE 802.11 MAC protocols are unable to deliver sustained quality of service while maintaining high network utilization, particularly under congested network conditions. The problem often resides in the fact that flows belonging to the same service class are assigned the same MAC parameters regardless theirs respective bitrate, which leads to throughput fairness rather than perceived QoS fairness. Harmonizing MAC parameters of traffic classes's flows may further lead to sub-optimal situations since certain network configurations (in terms of per class traffic load) can not be accommodated without reassigning the basic MAC parameters. In this paper, we propose a new cross-layer MAC design featuring a delay-sensitive backoff range adaptation along with a distributed flow admission control. By monitoring both MAC queue dynamics and network conditions, each traffic class reacts based on the degree to which application QoS metrics (delay) are satisfied. Besides, we use a distributed admission control mechanism to accept new flows while protecting the active one. Simulation results show that compared to the enhanced distributed coordination function (EDCA) scheme of 802.11e, our protocol consistently excels, in terms of network utilization, bounded delays, and service-level fairness.