Improved WWW multimedia transmission performance in HTTP/TCP overATM networks

Transmission control protocol/Internet protocol (TCP/IP) is the de facto standard of the networking world. It dynamically adjusts routing of packets to accommodate failures in channels and allows construction of very large networks with little central management. But IP packets are based on the datagram model and are not really suited to real-time traffic. In order to overcome the drawbacks, a new network technology, ATM, is proposed. ATM provides quality of service (QOS) guarantees for various classes of applications and in-order delivery of packets via connection oriented virtual circuits. Unfortunately, when ATM is to be internetworked with the existing network infrastructure, some special signaling, addressing and routing protocols are needed. IP over ATM is one of the methods proposed by IETF. It allows existing TCP/IP applications to run on ATM end-stations and ATM networks to interconnect with legacy LAN/WAN technologies. But the performance of TCP/IP over ATM leaves something to be desired. Partial packet discard (PPD) and early packet discard (EPD) are two schemes to improve its performance. This paper proposes a “selective packet retransmission” scheme for improving HTTP/TCP performance when transmitting through ATM networks. In selective packet retransmission, we take advantage of the property of humans' perception tolerance for errors to determine whether to retransmit a corrupted TCP segment or not. For lossable data, such as images, when an error occurs because of cell losses, it will not be retransmitted. The simulations show that, for the same buffer size and traffic load, selective packet retransmission performs better than PPD, EPD, and plain TCP over ATM     

An asynchronous scheduled MAC protocol for wireless sensor networks

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) comprise a number of autonomous sensors and one or more sinks to cooperatively monitor physical or environmental conditions. Energy efficiency is a key design factor of a MAC protocol for WSNs. Due to the importance of the problem, a number of energy efficient MAC protocols have been developed for WSNs. Preamble-sampling based MAC protocols (e.g., B-MAC and X-MAC) have overheads due to their preambles, and are inefficient at large wakeup intervals. SCP-MAC, a synchronous scheduled energy-efficient scheduling MAC protocol, minimizes the preamble by combining preamble sampling and scheduling techniques; however, it does not prevent energy loss due to overhearing; in addition, due to its synchronization procedure, it results in increased contention and delay. In this paper, we present an energy efficient MAC protocol for WSNs that avoids overhearing and reduces contention and delay by asynchronously scheduling the wakeup time of neighboring nodes. We provide an energy consumption analysis for multi-hop networks. To validate our design and analysis, we implement the proposed scheme in TinyOS. Experimental results show that AS-MAC considerably reduces energy consumption, packet loss and delay when compared with existing energy efficient MAC protocols.     

Delivering relative differentiated services in future high-speed networks using hierarchical dynamic deficit round robin

With the increasing deployment of real-time audio/video services over the Internet, provision of quality of service (QoS) has attracted much attention. When the line rate of future networks upgrades to multi-terabits per second, if routers/switches intend to deliver differentiated services through packet scheduling, the reduction of computational overhead and elimination of bottleneck resulting from memory latency will both become important factors. In addition, the decrease of average queueing delay and provision of small delays for short packets are two further critical factors influencing the delivery of better QoS for real-time applications. The advanced waiting time priority (AWTP) is a timestamp-based packet scheduler which is enhanced from the well-known WTP. Although AWTP considers the effect of packet size, the latency resulting from timestamp access and a great quantity of computational overhead may result in bottlenecks for AWTP being deployed over high-speed links. Many existing schedulers have the same problems. We propose a multi-level hierarchical dynamic deficit round-robin (MLHDDRR) scheduling scheme which is enhanced from the existing dynamic deficit round-robin scheduler. The new scheme can resolve these issues and efficiently provide relative differentiated services under a variety of load conditions. Besides, MLHDDRR can also protect the highest priority traffic from significant performance degradation due to bursts of low-priority traffic. We compare the performance of AWTP with the proposed scheme. Extensive simulation results and complexity analysis are presented to illustrate the effectiveness and efficiency of MLHDDRR.     

光纤通道交换机在强实时约束下的分组调度

以光纤通道交换网络强实时约束下的性能研究为背景,采用实时通信中的周期性任务模型,提出了负载匹配的加权轮循分组调度,导出了在该方法下网络消息集严格实时的充要条件,以最差情形下强实时的网络可达负载率为性能衡量指标推证了采用该算法的优越性并通过仿真进行了验证.     

Cross-layer packet scheduling for downlink multiuser OFDM systems

This paper proposes a channel and queue aware fair (CQAF) packet scheduling scheme for the downlink packet transmission in multiuser orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) systems. By making use of the information on the channel conditions and the queue lengths, the proposed CQAF packet scheduling scheme efficiently allocates the subcarriers, transmission power and modulation level to users under the constraints of total transmission power, the number of subcarriers, bit-error-rate (BER) requirement and generalized processor sharing (GPS)-based fairness requirement. The numerical results show that the proposed CQAF packet scheduling scheme can reduce the transmission delay and queue length significantly while maximizing system throughput and maintaining fairness among users.     

Decomposition approach to evaluate CSMA/CD protocol performance with asymmetric workload

A model is proposed for the analysis of a p-persistent, slotted CSMA/CD protocol on a local area network consisting of a finite population of buffered stations with different workloads. The analysis of the protocol is performed using a decomposition strategy, and considering each station as an M/G/1 queueing system. Since stations interact with each other in channel contention, the interference is modelled through the service time probability-density-function L-Transform of the queueing system. The average packet delay characteristics and the stability station behaviour are obtained; to prove the model accuracy, numerical results from both analysis and simulation are given. The influence of scheduling probability p on system stability and average packet delay are analysed. Furthermore, an assignment strategy for probability p is proposed to improve system performance with asymmetric workloads. Finally, the analysis is extended to the transmission of packet bursts on the channel.     

Fuzzy-Based Dynamic Distributed Queue Scheduling for Packet Switched Networks

Addressing the problem of queue scheduling for the packet-switched system is a vital aspect of congestion control. In this paper, the fuzzy logic based decision method is adopted for queue scheduling in order to enforce some level of control for traffic of different quality of service requirements using predetermined values. The fuzzy scheduler proposed in this paper takes into account the dynamic nature of the Internet traffic with respect to its time-varying packet arrival process that affects the network states and performance. Three queues are defined, viz low, medium and high priority queues. The choice of prioritizing packets influences how queues are served. The fuzzy scheduler not only utilizes queue priority in the queue scheduling scheme, but also considers packet drop susceptibility and queue limit. Through simulation it is shown that the fuzzy scheduler is more appropriate for the dynamic nature of Internet traffic in a packet-switched system as compared with some existing queue scheduling methods. Results show that the scheduling strategy of the proposed fuzzy scheduler reduces packet drop, provides good link utilization and minimizes queue delay as compared with the priority queuing (PQ), first-in-first-out (FIFO), and weighted fair queuing (WFQ).     

Linux环境下路由器中的网络带宽管理

Linux是目前广泛用于路由设备中的操作系统,而流量管理是这种网络操作系统的一个重要功能.研究了Linux系统的流量管理机制,发现当前Linux系统所采用的在网络接口的出口实现的基于网络包调度的流量管理机制缺乏对于网络带宽在系统范围的全局性的管理,也缺乏对于输入流的网络处理的有效管理和调度,从而造成不必要的CPU资源的浪费.为解决这一问题,提出了一种新颖的网络带宽管理机制,它通过调度网络协议处理所占用的CPU时间来实现带宽管理.这种新的机制将网络带宽的管理和调度从网络接口的出口点转移到处理接收到的网络包的系统软件中断处理程序中,从而克服了原来的流量管理机制的缺点.通过系统实现和对比实验,发现该机制本身给系统带来的负载小于Linux原来的流量管理机制,同时可以提供更好的流量隔离,并且能够有效地节省用于网络处理的CPU资源.     

Enhanced MAC protocol to support multimedia traffic in cognitive wireless mesh networks

With the advanced physical layer techniques such as multiple-input and multiple-output (MIMO) and orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM), transmission real-time 2D/3D contents and applications becomes more and more necessary in wireless networks for the amazing growing in demand of customers. However, the low efficiency of medium access control (MAC) protocol degrades the performance of real-time traffic greatly in multihop, wireless and mobile environment. Focusing on supporting real-time multimedia traffic in cognitive wireless mesh networks (WMNs), an enhanced MAC protocol is proposed. And the contribution of this paper is twofold: (1) An efficient carrier sense multiple access with collision avoidance (CSMA/CA) compatible time division multiple access (TDMA)-like MAC protocol called T-MAC is proposed, which aims to improve the system performance by allocating more channel access time in centralized manner and decreasing overhead. (2) An optimal adaptive scheduling scheme is proposed to support real-time multimedia applications and guarantee QoS for different priority traffic, which aims to find the optimized schedule among all possible sequences of concurrent transmissions by minimizing the occupied resources. Detailed simulation results and comparison with IEEE 802.11e MAC scheme show that the proposed T-MAC can effectively improve quality of service (QoS) for multimedia traffic in terms of throughput, end-to-end delay and packet loss rate, which also manifests that T-MAC is an efficient multimedia applications transmission scheme for mobile terminals and MAPs in cognitive WMNs.     

移动Ad Hoc网络中基于ID的信道预约多址接入协议

为了在移动ad hoc网络中有效利用无线信道资源,提出一种基于ID的信道预约(ID-based channel reservation,简称IDBCR)多址接入协议.该协议在公共信道上发送Request-To-Send/Clear-To-Send(RTS/CTS)分组实现握手,采用基于节点ID的信道选择方案选择无冲突的业务信道传输数据分组,目的节点成功接收完数据分组后在另一个公共信道上回复acknowledgment(ACK)分组,有效避免了暴露终端问题.最后,仿真实现了IDBCR协议,并与CAM-MAC(cooperative asynchronous multi-channel MAC)多信道协议比较.结果表明,在总信道利用率、平均信道利用率和平均分组延迟性能上,IDBCR多址接入协议明显优于CAM-MAC协议.     

Analysis of a contention-based opportunistic spectrum access under general channel activity model

We investigate a distributed contention-based spectrum access scheme in cognitive radio networks where ON/OFF periods of the channel by primary users follow discrete phase (PH) type distributions. The main motivation for ON/OFF having PH distributions is that the channel activity has a more general behavior depending on the primary users’ traffic. In the past most other researchers assumed that ON/OFF periods of a channel follow a geometric distribution for the purpose of mathematical tractability even though this assumption is restrictive.We propose a distributed medium access control (MAC) scheme for the secondary users (SUs) which is characterized by a constant contention window size and a method to decide whether for each SU to participate in competition or not depending on the queueing delay of a head-of-line (HoL) packet. In order to investigate the performance of our proposed MAC protocol, we construct a two-dimensional Markov chain which incorporates both the proposed MAC scheme and the general channel activity. The resulting one-step transition probability matrix of the Markov chain has a very special structure. With the help of the censored Markov chain method, we provide a computationally efficient method to obtain the stationary distribution of the Markov chain. We then obtain the system capacity, which is defined as the maximum number of SUs that can be accommodated with a quality of service (QoS) guarantee on the packet dropping probability and the packet delay. Numerical examples show that the system capacity considerably depends on the distributions of ON/OFF periods and our proposed MAC scheme achieves a higher capacity than the existing one.     

A cross-layer elastic CAC and holistic opportunistic scheduling for QoS support in WiMAX

QoS provisioning is an important issue in the deployment of broadband wireless access networks with real-time and non-real-time traffic integration. An opportunistic MAC (OMAC) combines cross-layer design features with opportunistic scheduling scheme to achieve high system utilization while providing QoS support to various applications. A single scheduling algorithm cannot guarantee all the QoS requirements of traffics without the support of a suitable CAC and vice versa. In this paper, we propose a cross-layer MAC scheduling framework and a corresponding opportunistic scheduling algorithm in tandem with the CAC algorithm to support QoS in WiMAX point-to-multipoint (PMP) networks. Extensive experimental simulations have been carried out to evaluate the performance of our proposal. The simulation results show that our proposed solution can improve the performance of WiMAX networks in terms of packet delay, packet loss rate and throughput. The proposed CAC scheme can guarantee the admitted connections to meet their QoS requirements.     

Input-output stability properties of networked control systems

Results on input-output L/sub p/ stability of networked control systems (NCS) are presented for a large class of network scheduling protocols. It is shown that static protocols and a recently considered dynamical protocol called try-once-discard belong to this class. Our results provide a unifying framework for generating new scheduling protocols that preserve L/sub p/ stability properties of the system if a design parameter is chosen sufficiently small. The most general version of our results can be used to treat NCS with data packet dropouts. The model of NCS and, in particular, of the scheduling protocol that we use appears to be novel and we believe that it will be useful in further study of these systems. The proof technique we use is based on the small gain theorem and it lends itself to an easy interpretation. We prove that our results are guaranteed to be better than existing results in the literature and we illustrate this via an example of a batch reactor.     

DTSMA: Distributed time-spread multiple access for wireless mesh networks with IEEE 802.16d MAC protocol

This paper studies the use of IEEE 802.16d mesh MAC protocol for multi-hop networking in an indoor domestic environment. The mesh network is expected to support time-sensitive audio–video applications with stringent QoS requirement. In the literature, time-spread multiple access (TSMA) is a promising technology to provide a minimum throughput guarantee in a multi-hop mesh network with dynamic topology. However, existing TSMA schemes require the number of nodes in the entire network and their global maximum node degree, be known a priori to a central controller. The requirement is not practical. In view of this problem, this paper proposes a distributed time-spread multiple access (DTSMA) scheme. The proposed DTSMA has the following main contributions: (a) A method for each node to determine locally its polynomial coefficients without a priori global knowledge of node number and maximum node degree, and (b) A method to distribute to neighbours the locally determined polynomial coefficients, and to resolve collision between two sets of identical polynomial coefficients from two neighbouring nodes. The proposed DTSMA has been evaluated through extensive simulations to confirm that it can indeed preserve the capability of providing a minimum throughput guarantee in the absence of the a priori global knowledge. In benchmark against the de facto distributed coordinated scheduling (DCS) in the original IEEE 802.16d mesh MAC protocol under various domestic wireless channel conditions, DTSMA outperforms in terms of packet delivery ratio and average end-to-end packet delay which are important metrics for time-sensitive audio–video applications. Simulation results also show that DTSMA outperforms TSMA in terms of average end-to-end packet delay and average delay jitter when the severity of propagation impairment is high.     

A genetic approach for downlink packet scheduling in HSDPA system

High speed downlink packet access (HSDPA) system currently under development in 3rd generation partnership project (3GPP) [1] employs number of parallel shared channels and adaptive modulation and coding scheme (MCS) to enable a high rate packet data transfer from base station (Node-B) to user equipment (UE). To decide how to share the available radio channel capacity amongst the active UEs, a packet scheduling and channel assignment algorithms are employed at Node B. Packet scheduling techniques such as max carrier to interference ratio (C/I) or round robin (RR) fails to take into account all the aspects of the quality of service (QoS) provisioning. In this paper, the fundamentals genetic algorithms and conventional wireless scheduling techniques are combined and the weaknesses of the existing known techniques are exploited to propose a novel hybrid genetic packet scheduler (HGPS) for the HSDPA system. A combination of random and intelligent diversity of population and comparative nature of the selection process of genetic engine contribute to its robustness. The proposed HGPS outperforms Max C/I packet scheduler in terms of total delivered throughput within low delay thresholds. Unlike conventional packet scheduling technique HGPS does not rely only on the current or past status of the scheduling process. By treating the possible solutions as points in a search space, the proposed HGPS through a genetically guided search visits and examines the possible solutions and estimates the impact of each these solution on overall performance of system in terms of fairness, throughput or QoS without actually performing a transmission. Subsequently, the solution that achieves the best estimated overall performance is chosen for the actual transmission. By means of computer simulation, performance of the HGPS algorithm is characterized in Rayleigh fading and shadowing radio channel conditions. The impact of imperfect reporting on the performance of HSDPA system is evaluated. We examine the joint impact of reporting latency, imperfect channel estimation and the corruption of reports in the feedback channel on the performance. It is shown that the proposed class of intelligent parallel random schedulers is highly robust against the imperfect reports from UEs. Acknowledgment The authors would like to acknowledge the valuable assistance provided by Mr Pierre Coulon of Fujitsu Laboratories of Europe Ltd.This work was presented in part at IEEE WPMC’2002, and will be presented in part at IEEE IST’2003.     

Adaptive Call Admission Control Based on Reward-Penalty Model in Wireless/Mobile Network

A dynamic threshold-based Call Admission Control （CAC） scheme used in wireless/mobile network for multiclass services is proposed. In the scheme, each class＇s CAC thresholds are solved through establishing a reward-penalty model which strives to maximize network＇s revenue. In order to lower Handoff Dropping Probability （HDP）, the scheme joints packet and connection levels Quality of Service constraints, designing a bandwidth degradation algorithm to accept handoff calls by degrading existing calls＇ bandwidth during network congestion. Analyses show that the CAC thresholds change adaptively with the average call arrival rate. The performance comparison shows that the proposed scheme outperforms the Mobile IP Reservation scheme.     

DLSOMAC:一个面向分布式无线链路调度技术的MAC协议

无线网络分布式链路调度技术通过发掘无线传输间的复用达到提高吞吐量的目的. 链路调度策略的形成需要节点间公平地交互含有如节点ID、队列长度等信息的短报文,并且这些短报文同步传输,导致信道拥挤.由于存在信道空闲侦听开销,在拥挤信道中频繁后退,以及隐藏终端和暴露终端的问题,传统的CSMA/CA (Carrier sense multiple access with collision avoidance)协议传输性能低下,难以为分布式无线链路调度技术服务. 针对链路调度策略形成期间报文短、信道拥挤以及公平性要求的挑战.提出了一个简单的随机MAC (Media access control)协议DLSOMAC (Distributed link scheduling oriented MAC). DLSOMAC协议没有信道侦听过程,以降低短报文的传输延迟开销;基于分布式息票收集算法,均匀分散传输时刻来降低冲撞概率和提高公平性,以满足分布式链路调度技术对MAC层的需求.用排队论分析了DLSOMAC的报文传输延迟性能.仿真实验表明, 在短报文情况下,无论网络负载轻重与否, DLSOMAC协议的报文传输延迟明显优于CSMA/CA,并且报文越短,性能相对越好.即使在长报文的情况下,当网络负载很重时, DLOSMAC协议也稍优于CSMA/CA协议,适合于为自组织网络的分布式链路调度技术服务.     

改进的移动IPv6与MPLS融合切换方案

针对多协议标签交换(MPLS)和IPv6融合方案存在建立标签交换路径(LSP)所需时延大、丢包率高和无错误恢复处理等问题,提出了一种新方案。通过信息收集,推算MH将要切换的网络,通过FA发现协议查找切换方位子网及其临近子网FA的地址,提前建立RA和这些FA的LSP,实现MH移交切换时延的最小化,同时,引入组播机制,减少切换时数据包的丢包率。仿真分析表明,所提方案的切换时延和丢包率小于现有方案。     

QoS敏感的802.11e分组调度算法

分析并总结无线网络中基于QoS的分组调度算法,针对802.11e EDCA机制中多媒体数据分组调度的不公平问题,提出QoS敏感的802.11e数据分组调度算法.首先,根据不同数据业务延时敏感性需求,提出新的基于紧急度的数据分组调度指标.然后,在802.11e协议中根据业务流的紧急度,调整不同业务流所对应AC队列的参数,改变AC队列信道访问优先级,使紧急业务流有更多机会竞争到信道访问权.最后,进行大量仿真实验,实验结果验证了所提算法的有效性.     

Incorporating packet semantics in scheduling of real-time multimedia streaming

In this work, we develop a novel packet scheduling algorithm that properly incorporates the semantics of a packet. We find that improvement in overall packet loss does not necessarily coincide with improvement in user perceivable QoS. The objective of this work is to develop a packet scheduling mechanism which can improve the user perceivable QoS. We do not focus on improving packet loss, delay, or burstiness. We develop a metric called, “Packet Significance,” that effectively quantifies the importance of a packet that properly incorporates the semantics of a packet from the perspective of compression. Packet significance elaborately incorporates inter-frame, intra-frame information dependency, and the transitive information dependency characteristics of modern compression schemes. We apply packet significance in scheduling the packet. In our context, packet scheduling consists of two technical ingredients: packet selection and interval selection. Under limited network bandwidth availability, it is desirable to transmit the subset of the packets rather than transmitting the entire set of packets. We use a greedy approach in selecting packets for transmission and use packet significance as the selection criteria. In determining the transmission interval of a packet, we incorporate the packet significance. Simulation based experiments with eight video clips were performed. We embed the decoding engine in our simulation software and examine the user perceivable QoS (PSNR). We compare the performance of the proposed algorithm with best effort scheduling scheme and one with simple QoS metric based scheduling scheme. Our Significance-Aware Scheduling scheme (SAPS) effectively incorporates the semantics of a packet and delivers best user perceivable QoS. SAPS can result in more packet loss or burstier traffic. Despite these limitations, SAPS successfully improves the overall user perceivable QoS.