Comparative analysis of wireless ATM channel access protocols supporting multimedia traffic

Extension of multimedia services and applications offered by ATM networks to wireless and mobile users has captured a lot of recent research attention. Research prototyping of wireless ATM networks is currently underway at many leading research and academic institutions. Various architectures have been proposed depending on the intended application domain. Successful implementation of wireless connectivity to ATM services is significantly dependent on the medium access control (MAC) protocol, which has to provide support for multimedia traffic and for qualityofservice (QoS) guarantees. The objective of this paper is to investigate the comparative performance of a set of access protocols, proposed earlier in the literature, with more realistic source traffic models. Data traffic is modeled with selfsimilar (fractal) behavior. Voice traffic is modeled by a slow speech activity detector (SAD). Video traffic is modeled as a H.261 video teleconference, where the number of ATM cells per video frame is described by a gamma distribution and a firstorder discrete autoregressive process model. A comparison of the protocols based on simulation data is presented. The goal of the paper is to identify appropriate techniques for effectively and efficiently supporting multimedia traffic and QoS. Simulation results show that boundaries between different types of services are necessary for multimedia traffic. Reservation for certain traffic type especially video can significantly improve its quality. Reducing the number of collisions is an important issue for wireless networks since contentions lead not only to potentially high delay but also result in high power consumption.     

Optical-LSP Establishment and a QoS Maintenance Scheme Based on Differentiated Optical QoS Classes in OVPNs

A virtual private network (VPN) over Internet has the benefit of being cost-effective and flexible. However, it has difficulties providing sufficient QoS and adequate transmission capacity for high bandwidth services. Given the increasing demand for high bandwidth Internet and the demand for QoS assurances in a VPN over Internet, IP/generalized multi-protocol label switching (GMPLS) based on a control plane combined with a high-bandwidth, dense-wavelength division multiplexing (DWDM) optical network is seen as a very favorable approach for realizing the future optical VPN (OVPN) over IP/GMPLS over DWDM. Within this architecture, providing QoS guaranteed multimedia services with a differentiated QoS guaranteed protocol framework with QoS recovery is one of the key issues to implement. Therefore, we suggest in this paper optical-label switched path (O-LSP) establishment and its QoS maintenance scheme based on differentiated optical QoS-service (DOQoS) classes. They are the key components for this DOQoS framework in assuring end-to-end QoS in an OVPN over IP/GMPLS over DWDM architecture.     

Incorporating QoS into IP Enterprise Network Design

Recent trends in enterprise networks are radically changing the composition of these systems. Instead of having diverse data networks, each of which is dedicated to a single class of applications, corporations are moving to a unified IP (Internet Protocol) Intranet. Traffic demands on these Intranets include delay-sensitive traffic that requires better than the standard best effort service provided by IP networks. As a result, various new technologies and strategies to provide end-to-end Quality of Service (QoS) within IP enterprise networks are being developed and implemented. However, current IP network design methodologies are limited in that they can only design networks providing best effort service or else, a single delay constraint for all traffic. In this paper, we discuss a new design methodology for IP enterprise networks that takes into account the new technologies and techniques that can provide QoS. In particular, we identify and discuss the most crucial design issues that must be addressed when specialized queuing-based QoS strategies are used in the network. We describe the new constraints introduced by the underlying technologies and discuss how these factors affect the formulation of the IP Enterprise Network Design Problem. We then describe some specific features and methodologies that have been incorporated into a network design-planning tool for IP enterprise networks with QoS.     

Routing with multiple QoS requirements for supporting multimedia applications

Distributed multimedia applications usually require multiple QoS performance guarantees. However, in general, searching such a route in the network, to support multimedia applications, is known to be NPcomplete. In this paper, we propose a new heuristic QoS routing algorithm, called QoSR_DKS, for supporting multimedia applications in highspeed networks. QoSR_DKS is a modification of rulebased Fallback routing and Dijkstra algorithms. It can search a unicast route that would have enough network resources so that multiple QoS requirements (bandwidth, delay, and delay jitter) of the requested flow could be guaranteed. Its worst case computation time complexity is the same as that of the Dijkstra algorithm, i.e., O(V²), where V is the number of nodes in the network. Extensive simulations were done with various network sizes, upto 500 nodes networks, where each node uses Weighted Fair Queueing (WFQ) service discipline. Results show that QoSR_DKS is very efficient. It could always find the QoS satisfying route, whenever there exists one (success rate is optimal), and its average computation time is near to simple shortest path Dijkstra algorithm.     

A scalable wireless virtual LAN

This paper presents a Wireless Virtual Local Area Network (WVLAN) to support mobility in IPoverATM local area networks. Mobility is handled by a joint ATMlayer handoff for connection rerouting and MAClayer handoff for location tracking, such that the effects of mobility are localized and transparent to the higherlayer protocols. Different functions, such as Address Resolution Protocol (ARP), mobile location, and ATM connection admission are combined to reduce protocol overhead and frontend delay for connectionless packet transmission in connectionoriented ATM networks. The proposed WVLAN, through the use of ATM technology, provides a scalable wireless virtual LAN solution for IP mobile hosts.     

MA‐WATM: A new approach towards an adaptive wireless ATM network

In a cellular multimedia network like wireless ATM (WATM), self control seems primordial. Our new approach is based on the application of DAI (distributed artificial intelligence) techniques in order to build a selfadaptive network within random nonuniform traffic conditions. Attempting to achieve a high network capacity in terms of resource allocation and air interface BER (bit error rate), we propose to apply intelligent agent features to enhance the architecture of WATM systems. In fact, the intelligent platform MAWATM (multiagent wireless ATM) is used to provide a flexible integration of the multiagent technique in wireless entities, BSs (base stations), MSs (mobile stations) and MSCs (mobile switching centers). Two applications are investigated and explored by simulations in order to bear out the feasibility of the multiagent approach.     

Mobile ATM buffer capacity analysis

This paper extends a stochastic theory for buffer fill distribution for multiple on and off sources to a mobile environment. Queue fill distribution is described by a set of differential equations assuming sources alternate asynchronously between exponentially distributed periods in on and off states. This paper includes the probabilities that mobile sources have links to a given queue. The sources represent mobile user nodes, and the queue represents the capacity of a switch. This paper presents a method of analysis which uses mobile parameters such as speed, call rates per unit area, cell area, and call duration and determines queue fill distribution at the ATM cell level. The analytic results are compared with simulation results.This paper is partially funded by ARPA contract number J-FBI-94-223.The Mathematica code for this paper can be found on http://www.tisl.ukans.edu/sbush.     

Evaluation of IP over WDM Network Architectures

The commonly used IP-backbone network architecture of today is IP/ATM/SDH/WDM. This architecture has many redundant functionalities and is not optimized to transport IP traffic. New approaches for simplified network architectures try to eliminate redundant functionalities and to decrease the protocol overhead and thereby transport IP as efficiently as possible over WDM-based optical networks. EURESCOM project P918 Integration of IP-over-optical networks: networking and management investigated scenarios for optimized IP transport in WDM-based backbone networks. In this paper, three architectures, namely Gigabit Ethernet, Packet over Sonet/SDH and Dynamic Packet Transport are investigated and evaluated as an alternative to the IP/ATM/SDH/WDM architecture.     

The Future Generations of Mobile Communications Based on Broadband Access Methods

The forthcoming mobile communication systems are expected to provide much variety of services from high quality voice to high definition videos through high data rate wireless channels at anywhere in the world. High data rate requires broad frequency bands, and sufficient broadband can be achieved in higher frequency bands such as microwave, Ka-band and millimeter-wave. Broadband wireless channels have to be connected to broadband fixed networks such as the Internet and local area networks. The future generation systems will include not only cellular phones, but also many new types of communication systems such as broadband wireless access systems, millimeter-wave LAN, intelligent transport systems (ITS) and high altitude stratospheric platform station (HAPS) systems. The key words in the future generations of mobile communications are multimedia communications, wireless access to broadband fixed networks and seamless roaming among different systems. This article discusses the future generations mobile communication systems.     

Systematic Width-and-Length Dependent CMOS Transistor Mismatch Characterization and Simulation

This paper presents a methodology for characterizing the random component of transistor mismatch in CMOS technologies. The methodology is based on the design of a special purpose chip which allows automatic characterization of arrays of NMOS and PMOS transistors of different sizes. Up to 30 different transistor sizes were implemented in the same chip, with varying transistors width W and length L. A simple strong inversion large signal transistor model is considered, and a new five parameters MOS mismatch model is introduced. The current mismatch between two identical transistors is characterized by the mismatch in their respective current gain factors /, V _TO threshold voltages , bulk threshold parameters , and two components for the mobility degradation parameter mismatch ₀ and _e. These two components modulate the mismatch contribution differently, depending on whether the transistors are biased in ohmic or in saturation region. Using this five parameter mismatch model, an extraordinary fit between experimental and computed mismatch is obtained, including minimum length (1 m) transistors for both ohmic and saturation regions. Standard deviations for these five parameters are obtained as well as their respective correlation coefficients, and are fitted to two dimensional surfaces f(W, L) so that their values can be predicted as a function of transistor sizes. These functions are used in an electrical circuit simulator (Hspice) to predict transistor mismatch. Measured and simulated data are in excellent agreement.     

An efficient demand-assignment multiple access protocol for wireless packet (ATM) networks

In a wireless packet (ATM) network that supports an integrated mix of multimedia traffic, the channel access protocol needs to be designed such that mobiles share the limited communications bandwidth in an efficient manner: maximizing the utilization of the frequency spectrum and minimizing the delay experienced by mobiles. In this paper, we propose and study an efficient demand-assignment channel access protocol, which we call Distributed-Queueing Request Update Multiple Access (DQRUMA). The protocol can be used for a wide range of applications and geographic distances. Mobiles need to send requests to the base station only for packets that arrive to an empty buffer. For packets that arrive to a non-empty buffer, transmission requests are placed collision-free by piggybacking the requests with packet transmissions. The simulation results show that even with the worst possible traffic characteristics, the delay-throughput performance of DQRUMA is close to the best possible with any access protocol. In addition, explicit slot-by-slot announcement of the transmit permissions gives the base station complete control over the order in which mobiles transmit their packets. This important feature helps the base station satisfy diverse Quality-of-Service (QoS) requirements in a wireless ATM network.     

Admission control with priorities: Approaches for multi‐rate wireless systems

Priority based linkbandwidth partitioning is required to support wireless multimedia services, having diverse QoS (delay, throughput) requirements, in mobile ad hoc networks with multimedia nodes. A new class of service disciplines, termed batch and prioritize or BP admission control (AC), is proposed. The BP algorithms use the delay tolerance of applications to batch requests in time slots. Bandwidth assignment is made either at the end of the slot, or during the slot, on a priority basis. Analytical and simulation models are developed to quantify the performance of the BP schemes. The results are compared with those obtained for a FirstComeFirstServed (FCFS) service discipline. The class of BP schemes trade off the delay and loss tolerance of applications to improve the net carried traffic on the link. Further, such schemes enable an easy implementation for adaptive prioritization, where the degree of precedence given to an application varies with offered load and the link capacity.     

A reservation-based multicast (RBM) routing protocol for mobile networks: initial route construction phase

We propose a combined multicast routing, resource reservation and admission control protocol, termed Reservation-Based Multicast (RBM), that borrows the Rendezvous Point or Core concept from multicast routing algorithms proposed for the Internet, but which is intended for operation in mobile networks and routes hierarchically-encoded data streams based on user-specified fidelity requirements, real-time delivery thresholds and prevailing network bandwidth constraints. The protocol exhibits the fully distributed operation and receiver-initiated orientation of these proposed algorithms; but, unlike them, the protocol is tightly coupled to a class of underlying, distributed, unicast routing protocols thereby facilitating operation in a dynamic topology. This paper focuses on the initial route construction phase, assumed to occur during a static snapshot of the dynamic topology, and is therefore applicable to fixed networks as well, e.g. the Internet.This work was sponsored by the U.S. Navy and the American Society for Engineering Education under the U.S. Navy's Summer Faculty Research Program.Each application must specify a mechanism for ensuring that a processor is always aware of its associated entities. For example, in the current Internet architecture, a group membership protocol [2] serves a similar function of keeping routers informed of the membership their directly attached subnetworks.A processor can be viewed as either an IP router or an ATM switch.     

A hybrid analysis/simulation for ATM performance with application to quality-of-service of CBR traffic

A discrete time queueing model for the performance of an ATM system is analyzed using matrix analytic methods. Time is segmented into slots with each slot equal to the transmission time of one ATM cell. The ATM system is modeled as a single server queue with Markovian arrivals and service time equal to one slot. The arrival process includes as a special case the superposition of on-off sources, possibly heterogeneous. The queueing model is of the M/G/1 type. By exploiting the structure of the M/G/1 type Markov chain, the complexity of the solution to the problem is reduced to only the inversion of a 2×2 matrix irrespective of the size of the Markov chain. This simplification allows us to investigate Constant Bit Rate (CBR) traffic performance (or quality-of-service) issues through a hybrid analysis/simulation approach. Specifically, we analyze the impact of on-off background traffic on the probability of consecutive cell losses, cell delay variation, and traffic shaper or playback buffer underflow and overflow probabilities of CBR traffic sources.     

Models for Audiovisual Fusion in a Noisy-Vowel Recognition Task

This paper presents a study of models for audiovisual (AV) fusion in a noisy-vowel recognition task. We progressively elaborate audiovisual models in order to respect the major principle demonstrated by human subjects in speech perception experiments (the synergy principle): audiovisual identification should always be more efficient than auditory-alone or visual-alone identification. We first recall that the efficiency of audiovisual speech recognition systems depends on the level at which they fuse sound and image: four AV architectures are presented, and two are selected for the following of the study. Secondly, we show the importance of providing a contextual input linked to the Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR) in the fusion process. Then we propose an original approach using an efficient nonlinear dimension reduction algorithm (curvilinear components analysis) in order to increase the performances of the two AV architectures. Furthermore, we show that this approach allows an easy and efficient estimation of the reliability of the audio sensor in relation to SNR, that this estimation can be used to control the AV fusion process, and that it significantly improves the AV performances. Hence, altogether, nonlinear dimension reduction, context estimation and control of the fusion process enable us to respect the synergy criterion for the two most used architectures.     

Predictive Caching Strategy for On-Demand Routing Protocols in Wireless Ad Hoc Networks

Route caching strategy is important in on-demand routing protocols in wireless ad hoc networks. While high routing overhead usually has a significant performance impact in low bandwidth wireless networks, a good route caching strategy can reduce routing overheads by making use of the available route information more efficiently. In this paper, we first study the effects of two cache schemes, link cache and path cache, on the performance of on-demand routing protocols through simulations based on the Dynamic Source Routing (DSR) protocol. Since the path cache DSR has been extensively studied, we focus in this paper on the link cache DSR in combination with timer-based stale link expiry mechanisms. The effects of different link lifetime values on the performance of routing protocol in terms of routing overhead, packet delivery ratio and packet latency are investigated. A caching strategy incorporating adaptive link timeout is then proposed, which aims at tracking the optimal link lifetime under various node mobility levels by adaptively adjusting the link lifetime based on the real link lifetime statistics. The performance of the proposed strategy is then compared with the conventional path cache DSR. The results show that without a timeout mechanism, a link cache scheme may suffer severe performance degradation due to the use of broken routes, while the proposed adaptive link cache strategy achieves significantly improved performance by reducing the routing overhead when the network traffic load is high.     

Higher-order terms in asymptotic expansion for information loss in quantized random processes

Uniform quantization of random vectors onto -grids ⁿ is considered. Higherorder terms in asymptotic expansions for the entropy of the -quantized random vector and for the loss of the mutual information between two random vectors under such quantization as 0+are obtained. The coefficients in these asymptotics are explicitly calculated for Gaussian distributed vectors. Taken for initial segments of stationary Gaussian sequences, these factors have limit average values per unit of time. For such sequences governed by state-space equations, computation of these average values is reduced to solutions of algebraic matrix Riccati and Lyapunov equations.Work supported by the Australian Research Council grant A 4970 2246.     

Building video‐on‐demand servers

We have designed and implemented a controllable software architecture for a VideoonDemand (VOD) server. With the proposed software architecture, many system design issues can be investigated. For example, we studied several disk striping schemes in the storage subsystem and examined the impact of the disk striping schemes on the utilization of system resources. In the processing component, we observed that additional concurrent video streams can be supported by using efficient memory interleaving. Buffering with a large memory space in the processing subsystem is a common technique to alleviate the latency variance of accessing different system components. By employing userlevel control and scheduling, the variance can be decreased thereby reducing the resulting buffer space needed for each video stream. In the network subsystem, we adopted a serverdriven approach for investigating MPEG2 video delivery over Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) networks. The VOD server controls the pace of video transmission and reduces the complexity of the client. Since the client has limited buffer space (due to cost considerations), we have reduced the buffer requirement by regulating the transmission based on timing information embedded in the MPEG2 streams. Our research and experimental results are based on a VOD server which is currently under construction. The prototype server is based on an SGI sharedmemory multiprocessor with a mass storage system consisting of RAID3 disk arrays. Using 30 RAID3 disk arrays, preliminary experimental results show that the prototype server can potentially support more than 360 highquality video streams with careful design and coordination of the different system components.     

An FPGA Based Coprocessor for GLCM and Haralick Texture Features and their Application in Prostate Cancer Classification

Grey Level Co-occurrence Matrix (GLCM), one of the best known tool for texture analysis, estimates image properties related to second-order statistics. These image properties commonly known as Haralick texture features can be used for image classification, image segmentation, and remote sensing applications. However, their computations are highly intensive especially for very large images such as medical ones. Therefore, methods to accelerate their computations are highly desired. This paper proposes the use of programmable hardware to accelerate the calculation of GLCM and Haralick texture features. Further, as an example of the speedup offered by programmable logic, a multispectral computer vision system for automatic diagnosis of prostatic cancer has been implemented. The performance is then compared against a microprocessor based solution.Muhammad Atif Tahir received a BE degree in Computer Systems Engineering from NED University of Eng. and Tech. Karachi, Pakistan, and an MSc in Computer Engineering from KFUPM, Dhahran, Saudi Arabia. He is currently a PhD research student in School of Computer Science at Queens University Belfast, UK. His main research interests are Custom Computing using FPGAs, Image/Signal Processing, Pattern Recognition, QoS Routing and Optimization heuristics.Ahmed Bouridane obtained an Ingéniorat dEtat degree in Electronics from the National Polytechnic School of Algiers ENP, an MPhil degree in VLSI design for Signal Processing from the University of Newcastle Upon Tyne (UK) and a PhD degree in Computer Vision from the University of Nottingham (UK). Dr A Bouridane held several positions in R&D before joining Queens University Belfast where he is now a Reader in Computer Science. His research interests are in High Performance Image/Signal Processing, Image/Video Watermarking, Custom Computing using FPGAs, Computer Vision and High Performance Architectures for Image/Signal Processing.Fatih Kurugollu received his B.Sc, M.Sc. and Ph.D degree in computer science from the Istanbul Technical University, Istanbul, Turkey in 1989, 1994 aand 2000, respectively. He is currently a lecturer in Computer Science at Queens University, Belfast (UK). His research interest include soft computing for image and video object segmentation, hardware architectures for image and video applications and image watermarking.     

Enhanced reserved polling multiaccess technique for multimedia personal communication systems

This article describes a multiaccess technique which allows the transport of multimedia information across global personal communication systems (PCS). Impressive growth in the application of wireless technologies to telecommunications has sparked active research on a new generation of mobile radio networks projected to handle heterogeneous traffic types. One of the key requirements of these advanced systems is the multiaccess protocol which must guarantee quality of service and provide efficient access to multirate broadband applications that combine voice, video and data communications. In addition, the protocol is required to operate with the demanding constraints imposed by moving users, dynamic traffic load variations and highly sensitive wireless links. To this end, a multiaccess scheme called enhanced reserved polling is proposed. The scheme is designed to execute many PCSrelated functions including radio resource assignment, connection control and mobility management. It accommodates a diverse mixture of delay classes/message priorities and can also enhance the bandwidth sharing among different cells in the network.