End-to-end support for statistical quality of service in heterogeneous mobile ad hoc networks

In heterogeneous mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs), different types of mobile devices with diverse capabilities may coexist in the same network. The heterogeneity of MANETs makes end-to-end support for quality of service (QoS) guarantees more difficult than in other types of networks, not to mention the limited bandwidth and frequent topology changes of these networks. Since QoS routing is the first step toward achieving end-to-end QoS guarantees in heterogeneous MANETs, we propose a QoS routing protocol for heterogeneous MANETs. The proposed protocol, called virtual grid architecture protocol (VGAP), uses a cross-layer approach in order to provide end-to-end statistical QoS guarantees. VGAP operates on a fixed virtual rectilinear architecture (virtual grid), which is obtained using location information obtained from global positioning system (GPS). The virtual grid consists of a few, but possibly more powerful, mobile nodes known as ClusterHeads (CHs) that are elected periodically. CHs discover multiple QoS routes on the virtual grid using an extended version of the open shortest path first (OSPF) routing protocol and an extended version of WFQ scheduling policy that takes into account the wireless channel state. Moreover, VGAP utilizes a simple power control algorithm at the physical layer that provides efficient energy savings in this heterogeneous setting. Simulation experiments show that VGAP has a good performance in terms of packet delivery ratio, end-to-end packet delay, call blocking probability, and network scalability.     

流媒体传输中的QoS研究及其实现

文中提出的对视频会议的服务质量控制策略是为解决以下问题:视频会议对涉及到的实时数据流传输对网络带宽、时延和丢包率有较高要求,但是,目前得到广泛应用的IP网络是一种尽力而为的网络,它并没有对实时多媒体提供任何服务质量保证。该策略从两个方面对服务质量加以控制:在发送端控制发送流量;在数据再现端通过缓冲机制控制媒体同步。     

Two different approaches for providing QoS in the Internet backbone

This paper compares two different approaches for providing QoS in the Internet backbone. The first, denoted as simple approach, is a simple method of Admission Control performed by a weighted-fair-queuing scheduler. This approach guarantees QoS with a suitable overprovisioning of transmission resources. The second approach, denoted as basic statistical approach, is a full-featured statistical framework, based on the central limit approximation, for estimating the delay bound violation probability associated to each traffic class, given the offered traffic and the schedulers’ configuration. Both approaches adopt the dual-leaky-bucket (p, r, b) regulated traffic model in order to characterize the aggregate traffic flows. At first, we analyze the characteristics of both approaches in order to point out the respective pros and cons. Then, we propose an enhanced version of the basic statistical approach, the enhanced statistical approach. Our novel approach, as opposed to the basic statistical approach, performs a joint optimization of the regulator’s parameters and of the network capacity instead of a separate optimization. Our study shows that the enhanced statistical approach outperforms both the basic statistical approach and the simple approach and offers the highest potential for a better utilization of transmission resources. The basic and the enhanced statistical approaches assume that traffic is Gaussian. The simple approach has looser constraints on the statistical behavior of traffic, but it requires overprovisioning of transmission resources to guarantee the required QoS in terms of packet delay and loss.     

Structuring communication software for quality-of-serviceguarantees

We propose architectural mechanisms for structuring host communication software to provide QoS guarantees. We present and evaluate a QoS sensitive communication subsystem architecture for end hosts that provides real time communication support for generic network hardware. This architecture provides services for managing communication resources for guaranteed QoS (real time) connections, such as admission control, traffic enforcement, buffer management, and CPU and link scheduling. The architecture design is based on three key goals: maintenance of QoS guarantees on a per connection basis, overload protection between established connections, and fairness in delivered performance to best effort traffic. Using this architecture we implement real time channels, a paradigm for real time communication services in packet switched networks. The proposed architecture features a process per channel model that associates a channel handler with each established channel. The model employed for handler execution is one of “cooperative” preemption, where an executing handler yields the CPU to a waiting higher priority handler at well defined preemption points. The architecture provides several configurable policies for protocol processing and overload protection. We present extensions to the admission control procedure for real time channels to account for cooperative preemption and overlap between protocol processing and link transmission at a sending host. We evaluate the implementation to demonstrate the efficacy with which the architecture maintains QoS guarantees on outgoing traffic while adhering to the stated design goals     

Design of Reliable IP/GMPLS Networks: An Integrated Approach

The increased bandwidth demand for new Internet applications suggests mapping IP directly over the wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM) layer. Since reliability is such a critical issue in these broadband networks, we propose an integrated design method which addresses the problem of survivability as viewed from the IP/MPLS layers but taking into account the failure mechanisms in the optical layer. This approach is becoming practical because of the emergence of generalized multiprotocol label switching (GMPLS) as a multilayer control plane that can support the signaling required for coordinating the restoration mechanisms in multiple layers.The model relies on network calculus to evaluate a quality of service (QoS) metric as actually perceived by end users and computes a preplanned restoration scheme to recover from failures. We discuss the numerical implementation, the convergence and the solutions produced by the algorithm and show that the resulting network can provide the prescribed QoS guarantees for all failure states.     

Feedback-based synchronization in system area networks for cluster computing

Many applications in cluster computing require QoS (quality of service) services. Since performance predictability is essential to provide QoS service, underlying systems must provide predictable performance guarantees. One way to ensure such guarantees from network subsystems is to generate global schedules from applications' network requests and to execute the local portion of the schedules at each network interface. To ensure accurate execution of the schedules, it is essential that a global time base must be maintained by local clocks at each network interface. The task of providing a single time base is called a synchronization problem and this paper addresses the problem for system area networks. To solve the synchronization problem, FM-QoS [K. Connelly (1999)] proposed a simple synchronization mechanism called FBS (feedback-based synchronization) which uses built-in flow control signals. This paper extends the basic notion of FM-QoS to a theoretical framework and generalizes it: 1) to identify a set of built-in network flow control signals for synchrony and to formalize it as a synchronizing schedule and 2) to analyze the synchronization precision of FBS in terms of flow control parameters. Based on generalization, two application classes are studied for a single switch network and a multiple switch network. For each class, a synchronizing schedule is proposed and its bounded skew is analyzed. Unlike FM-QoS, the synchronizing schedule is proven to minimize the bounded skew value for a single switch network. To understand the analysis results in practical networks, skew values are obtained with flow control parameters of Myrinet-2000. We observed that the maximum bounded skew of FBS is 5.79/spl mu/sec or less over all our experiments. Based on this result, we came to a conclusion that FBS was a feasible synchronization mechanism in system area networks.     

区分服务网络基于测量的接纳控制方案的设计与应用

提出了一种分布式可扩展的接纳控制方案，其目的是为区分服务网络提供端到端服务质量（Quality of Services,QoS)保证，该方案主要由以下部分构成：（1）连接接纳控制协议，主要负责主机和网络节点以及网络节点和带宽代理之间的信息传送，实现对连接请求的串行操作；（2）位于网络核心节点的可用带宽估计算法；（3）位于网络边缘节点的接纳控制算法；给出了该方案在视频传输方面的应用实例；利用多种网络拓扑结构和QoS指标评价该方案的性能，实验结果表明该方案能准确地控制可接纳区域和提高网络资源的利用率。     

Assured end-to-end QoS through adaptive marking in multi-domain differentiated services networks

The issue of resource management in multi-domain Differentiated Services (DiffServ) networks has attracted a lot of attention from researchers who have proposed various provisioning, adaptive marking and admission control schemes. In this paper, we propose a Reinforcement Learning-based Adaptive Marking (RLAM) approach for providing assured end-to-end quality of service (QoS) in the form of end-to-end delay and throughput assurances, while minimizing packet transmission cost since ‘expensive’ Per Hop Behaviors like Expedited Forwarding (EF) are used only when necessary. The proposed scheme tries to satisfy per flow end-to-end QoS through control action,s which act on flow aggregates in the core of the network. Using an ns2 simulation of a multi-domain DiffServ network with multimedia traffic, the RLAM scheme is shown to be effective in significantly lowering packet transmission costs without sacrificing end-to-end QoS, when compared to the commonly used static marking scheme.     

Real-time applications in a CRMA network: a performance analysis

This paper analyses bandwidth allocation schemes for managing real-time applications (Variable Bit Rate video and voice) in a CRMA network. A methodology to compute the Quality of Service (QoS) experienced by variable bit rate (VBR) video and voice sources is proposed. As VBR video applications only tolerate extremely low packet loss rates (< 10⁻⁸), we need a computational approach to estimate very low tail probabilities. Studying the QoS with a simulation technique is not feasible, because computational costs make it almost impossible to estimate tail distribution probabilities lower than 10⁻²−10⁻³. Therefore, to achieve this target, we propose a model which represents a CRMA network's worst case behaviour (i.e. a scenario with maximum network congestion), and which can be solved analytically. By solving this model for different bandwidth allocation schemes, we can obtain the corresponding bounds on the QoS experienced by VBR video users. Finally, for those bandwidth allocation schemes which provide an acceptable QoS for VBR video traffic, we also estimate (via a trace-driven simulation) the QoS achieved by voice users.     

Resource allocation and admission control for the provisioning of quality of service in networks of static priority schedulers

This paper, proposes an analytical method for the resource allocation and admission control of traffic flows with statistical Quality-of-Service (QoS) guarantees in a Static Priority service discipline, in the case of both isolated nodes and end-to-end paths comprising multiple schedulers. The statistical QoS targets for each service class are expressed in terms of a delay bound and delay violation probability. Moreover, we assume that traffic admits a linear variance envelope; therefore, the method accounts for Leaky-Bucket-regulated traffic, for general Markov-Modulated Poisson Process sources and Markov-Modulated Fluid Process sources and, in general, to the wide class of sources for which the variance of the cumulative generated traffic can be upper bounded by a linear function of time. Under these assumptions, the resource allocation problem is solved analytically by deriving the closed-form expression of the minimum capacity to be allocated in the network in order to guarantee concurrently the QoS of all traffic flows across all service priorities. Moreover, the closed-form analytical solution of the admission control problem is obtained by deriving the expression of the maximum number of flows that is possible to accept, in all priority levels, knowing the link capacity, with differentiated statistical QoS constraints on delay for each priority level. Furthermore, by exploiting the bounded-variance network calculus, a novel framework for the calculation of statistical end-to-end delay bounds, we iterate our formulas, derived for the isolated node, to multi-node paths and, in turn, we provide analytical closed forms for the performance evaluation of end-to-end delay.     

A multi-layer experimental study of multimedia and QoS communication in wireless mesh networks

A significant issue in Mesh networks is to support multimedia transmissions while providing Quality of Service (QoS) guarantees to mobile users. For real-time multimedia streaming, unstable throughput or insufficient bandwidth will incur unexpected delay or jitter, and it remains difficult to provide comprehensive service guarantees for a wireless mesh environment. In this paper, we target the problem of providing multimedia QoS in wireless mesh networks. We design and implement a campus test-bed for supporting multimedia traffic in mobile wireless mesh networks, and investigate in detail some possible improvements on a number of layers to enable multimedia transmission over wireless networks with QoS support. We first study a number of improvements of some existing routing protocols to support multimedia transmissions. Some new admission control and rate control mechanisms are studied and their performance gains are verified in our experiments. In our new cross-layer adaptive rate control (CLARC) mechanism, we adaptively change the video encoder’s output bit rate based on the available network bandwidth to improve the quality of the received video. We also design a mobile gateway protocol to connect the MANET to Internet and a wireless LAN management protocol to automatically manage WLAN to provide some QoS.     

Practical algorithms for scheduling video data in a local area network environment

Simultaneous transmission of multiple high quality video streams from a server to the clients is becoming an increasingly important class of traffic in a network of workstations or cluster environment. With a powerful symmetric multiprocessor (SMP) as the server and a high-speed network, such transmission is practicable from a hardware point of view. However, the actual construction of such a video data server system entails tackling a number of difficult problems related to the provision of strict quality of service (QoS) guarantees. Among others, the smoothing and scheduling of multiple video packet streams are two crucial issues. Smoothing is concerned with reducing the rate variability of video streams in view of the fact that video data are usually compressed in a variable bit rate fashion. Scheduling is important to guarantee the requested QoS levels while maximizing the utilization of the resources. Although much work on smoothing has been done, it is not clear which scheduling scheme is suitable for multiplexing smoothed video data to the network. In this paper we present an extensive performance study of the EDF and RM scheduling algorithms which are modified to provide QoS guarantees for smoothed video data. With a probabilistic definition of QoS, admission control conditions are incorporated into the two algorithms. Furthermore, a counter-based scheduling module is included as the core scheduling mechanism which adaptively adjusts the actual QoS levels assigned to requests. Our theoretical analysis of the two modified algorithms, called QEDF and QRM, shows that the QRM algorithm is more robust than the QEDF algorithm for different workload and utilization conditions. We also propose to use a new metric called meta-QoS to quantify the overall performance of a packet scheduler given a set of simultaneous requests. In our experiments based on an SMP-based Linux platform, we find that the QRM algorithm can sustain a rather stable level of meta-QoS even when the workload and utilization levels are increased. On the other hand, the QEDF algorithm, due to its conservative admission control policy, is found to be not suitable for a high level of utilization and a large number of requests. In view of the lower complexity of the QRM algorithm, it seems that the QRM approach is a more suitable candidate for packet scheduling in the client-server environment considered in our study.

Quality of service provisioning for distributed data center inter-connectivity enabled by network virtualization

Today’s service platform or Cloud service models, such as Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), enable customers to deploy and execute applications on an on-demand available infrastructure. Such platforms reduce operational expenses for the service provider and lower the entry barrier for small and medium enterprises. However, current commercial solutions do not provide sufficient quality of service (QoS) guarantees for some applications. For example, they do not support various interactive real-time applications.In this paper, we introduce a way overcome these current Cloud service limitations. We show how to provide and guarantee quality of service requirements for resource networks within an IaaS framework.Our work has focused on methods for network resource management and flow control as well as QoS models. We have developed a framework that enables QoS support for real-time services executing within an IaaS environment.     

Spectral efficiency of cognitive radio networks under interference constraint and QoS guarantees

We study the problem of maximizing spectral efficiency of cognitive radio network deployments subject to an interference constraint and under specific quality of service (QoS) guarantees. The interference constraint corresponds to the upper limit of the received power that can be tolerated at the licensed users’ due to transmissions from unlicensed users. The QoS guarantees stem from the requirements imposed by the applications running at the users’ terminals. A cross-layer design is adopted that maps the user’s requirements into delay related QoS guarantees at the data link layer and error probability QoS guarantees at the physical layer. The obtained numerical results provide important insights regarding the impact of the considered constraint and guarantees on the achievable spectral efficiency of cognitive radio networks.     

An Approach to Quality of Service Management in Distributed Multimedia Application: Design and an Implementation

Most work related to quality of service (QoS) is concerned with individual system components, such as the operating system or the network. However, to support distributed multimedia applications, the entire distributed system must participate in providing the guaranteed performance levels. In recognition of this, a number of QoS architectures have been proposed to provide QoS guarantees. The mechanisms and schemes proposed by those architectures are used in a rather static manner since the involved entities, e.g., the network, sender and receiver, are known before the connection (call) set-up phase. In contrast to these architectures, we propose a general QoS management framework which supports the dynamic choice of a configuration of system components to support the QoS requirements for the user of a specific application. We consider different possible system configurations and select the most appropriate one depending on the desired QoS and the available resources. In this paper we present an overview of this general framework; especially, we concentrate on QoS negotiation and adaptation mechanisms. To show the feasibility of this approach, we designed and implemented a QoS manager for distributed multimedia presentational applications, such as news-on-demand. The negotiation and adaptation mechanisms which are supported by the QoS manager are specializations of the general framework. The proposed framework allows to improve the utilization of system resources, and thus to increase the system availability; it also allows to recover automatically, if this is possible, from QoS degradations. Furthermore, it provides the flexibility to incorporate different resource reservation schemes and scheduling policies, and to accommodate new system component technologies.     

基于QoS的P2P网络服务组合的算法

现有的P2P网络服务缺乏服务质量保证,很难应用于商业领域.将服务质量属性引入P2P网络服务,提出了P2P网络中服务组合模型,并且给出一个基于服务质量的P2P服务组合计算方法.然后提出一种拉格朗日松弛法算法,给出了满足用户服务水平协议的服务组合求解步骤.实验结果表明,提出的拉格朗日松弛法求解P2P服务组合计算的模型有良好的时间性能.     

QoS in InfiniBand subnetworks

The InfiniBand architecture (IBA) has been proposed as an industry standard both for communication between processing nodes and I/O devices and for interprocessor communication. It replaces the traditional bus-based interconnect with a switch-based network for connecting processing nodes and I/O devices. It is being developed by the InfiniBand/sup SM/ Trade Association (IBTA) in the aim to provide the levels of reliability, availability, performance, scalability, and quality of service (QoS) required by present and future server systems. For this purpose, IBA provides a series of mechanisms that are able to guarantee QoS to the applications. In previous papers, we have proposed a strategy to compute the InfiniBand arbitration tables. In one of these, we presented and evaluated our proposal to treat traffic with bandwidth requirements. In another, we evaluated our strategy to compute the InfiniBand arbitration tables for traffic with delay requirements, which is a more complex task. In this paper, we evaluate both these proposals together. Furthermore, we also adapt these proposals in order to treat VBR traffic without QoS guarantees, but achieving very good results. Performance results show that, with a correct treatment of each traffic class in the arbitration of the output port, all traffic classes reach their QoS requirements.     

Design and implementation of QoS-provisioning system for voice over IP

In this paper, we address issues in implementing voice over IP (VoIP) services in packet switching networks. VoIP has been identified as a critical real-time application in the network QoS research community and has been implemented in commercial products. To provide competent quality of service for VoIP systems comparable to traditional PSTN systems, a call admission control (CAC) mechanism has to be introduced to prevent packet loss and over-queuing. Several well-designed CAC mechanisms, such as the site-utilization-based CAC-and the link-utilization-based CAC mechanisms have been in place. However, the existing commercial VoIP systems have not been able to adequately apply and support these CAC mechanisms and, hence, have been unable to provide QoS guarantees to voice over IP networks. We have designed and implemented a QoS-provisioning system that can be seamlessly integrated with the existing VoIP systems to overcome their weakness in offering QoS guarantees. A practical implementation of our QoS-provisioning system has been realized.     

A novel path protection scheme for MPLS networks using multi-path routing

Multi-protocol label switching (MPLS) is an evolving network technology that is used to provide traffic engineering (TE) and high speed networking. Internet service providers, which support MPLS technology, are increasingly demanded to provide high quality of service (QoS) guarantees. One of the aspects of QoS is fault tolerance. It is defined as the property of a system to continue operating in the event of failure of some of its parts. Fault tolerance techniques are very useful to maintain the survivability of the network by recovering from failure within acceptable delay and minimum packet loss while efficiently utilizing network resources.In this paper, we propose a novel approach for fault tolerance in MPLS networks. Our approach uses a modified (k, n) threshold sharing scheme with multi-path routing. An IP packet entering MPLS network is partitioned into n MPLS packets, which are assigned to node/link disjoint LSPs across the MPLS network. Receiving MPLS packets from k out of n LSPs are sufficient to reconstruct the original IP packet. The approach introduces no packet loss and no recovery delay while requiring reasonable redundant bandwidth. In addition, it can easily handle single and multiple path failures.     

An end-to-end QoS framework with on-demand bandwidth reconfiguration

This paper proposes a new QoS framework, called the On-Demand QoS Path framework (ODP). It provides end-to-end QoS guarantees to individual flows with minimal overhead, while keeping the scalability characteristic of DiffServ. ODP exercises per-flow admission control and end-to-end bandwidth reservation at the edge of the network and only differentiates service types in the core of the network. In addition, to adapt to dynamically changing traffic load, ODP monitors the bandwidth utilization of the network and performs dynamic bandwidth reconfiguration in the network core based on the monitored bandwidth utilization. Through extensive simulations, the performance of ODP is investigated and compared with that of IntServ and DiffServ frameworks. The simulation results clearly showed that ODP provides end-to-end QoS guarantees to individual flows, which DiffServ can not provide, with much less overhead than IntServ.