Flowmeter for QoS provision in packet switched networks

A flowmeter is a set of traffic-related variables associated with a connection established in a network node as a result of the connection setup. Comprehensive quality-of-service provision to each packet flow is the purpose of flowmeter-based dynamic packet scheduling. The earliest deadline first (EDF) scheduling algorithm is adopted for rate allocation, delay control, and flow control. A gas pressure admission control algorithm is also presented to simplify EDF admission test. The delay performance of the scheduler is evaluated on a subnetwork of the Internet     

Timeliness of real-time IP communication in switched industrial Ethernet networks

Through several giant evolutionary steps, Ethernet has become an almost ubiquitous technology for communication. Being versatile enough to be employed in new and various fields of application, it is now making inroads in factories. However, automated systems are different from many other applications of Ethernet,first and foremost because they require the network technology to deliver real-time performance. In the present study, a number of critical aspects of Ethernet, usually referred to as an Industrial Ethernet, are examined. More specifically, there is a focus on the application-to-application delay and jitter characteristics of such networks, when using Internet protocols such as UDP and TCP. It is demonstrated how important it is to take control of the latency in the station nodes, since the main communication delays occur inside the nodes, and different solutions are presented for controlling these delays. In particular, a priority-based protocol stack is assessed. The results show that real-time, Ethernet-based IP communication is now adequate even for demanding automated applications. In this paper, substation automation (power distribution) is used as an example of a demanding automation system.     

A survey of differentiated QoS schemes in optical burst switched networks

Optical Burst Switching (OBS) has proved to be an efficient paradigm for supporting IP-over-WDM networks. The growth of a variety of applications which transmit voice, data, video and multimedia, has necessitated the need to provide Quality of Service over OBS networks. We present a survey of various existing schemes that provide differentiated service. We classify these schemes based on the stage at which service differentiation is performed, namely assembly time, reservation, scheduling, and contention resolution and compare the advantages and disadvantages of each scheme. We then present a model of how differentiated QoS can be provided in terms of various grades of protection mechanisms.     

Dynamic resource management in QoS controlled networks

This paper addresses the problem of resource fragmentation (RF) in QoS controllednetworks. Resources are said to be fragmented when they are available in non-contiguousblocks and hence cannot be utilized by incoming calls with high resource demands. This paper shows the effect of resource fragmentation on QoS controlled networks and presents the Dynamic Resource Redistribution (DRR) algorithm to counteract RF. The DRR algorithm reduces the effects of RF by attempting to redistribute resources in different paths to make resources to incoming calls. A variety of simulation experiments were conducted to study the performance of the DRR algorithm on different network topologies with varying traffic characteristics. The DRR algorithm, when used, increased the number of calls accommodated in the network as well as the overall resource allocation in the network.     

Programmable agents for flexible QoS management in IP networks

Network programmability seems to be a promising solution to network management and quality of service (QoS) control. Software mobile-agents technology is boosting the evolution toward application-level control of network functionalities. Code may be deployed in the network dynamically and on demand for the benefit of applications or application classes. Agents support a dynamic distribution of control and management functions across networks, thus increasing flexibility and efficiency. We propose to use mobile-agent technology to overcome some of the problems inherent in current Internet technology. We focus our attention to QoS monitoring, being locally significant in network subdomains, and realize a QoS management strategy in response to variations of user, customer of application requirements, and of the network state. We describe our experience and the results obtained from our testbed, where software agents are instantiated, executed, migrated, and suspended in order to implement flexible QoS management in IP networks     

QoS handover management for multimedia LEO satellite networks

Low earth orbit (LEO) satellite systems gained considerable interest towards the end of the previous decade by virtue of some of the appealing features that are endowed with, such as low propagation delay and the ability to communicate with handheld terminals. However, after the limited commercial success of the first networks of this kind, future satellite networks are now conceived as complementary rather than competitive to terrestrial networks. In this paper, we focus on one of the most influential factors in system performance, that is, the handover of a call. First, we provide a succinct review of the handover strategies that have been proposed in the literature. Then we propose two different satellite handover techniques for broadband LEO satellite systems that capitalize upon the satellite diversity that a system may provide. The proposed schemes cater for multimedia traffic and are based on the queuing of handover requests. Moreover, a deallocation scheme is also proposed according to which capacity reservation requests are countermanded when the capacity that they strive to reserve is unlikely to be used. Simulation studies further document and confirm the positive characteristics of the proposed handover schemes.     

QoS management in mobile IP networks using a terminal assistant

This paper describes a signalling environment for Quality of Service (QoS) negotiation and advance resource reservation in mobile IP networks. This environment is built in conformance with the generic signalling environment, which is standardized by the NSIS IETF working group. The advanced resource reservation protocol, called MQoS NSLP, is based on the QoS NSLP signalling application. It provides to mobile terminals the QoS required based on the user's mobility and QoS profile. In this work, we investigate the use of some techniques of the AI (Artificial Intelligence) domain to implement a user interface called NIA (Negotiation Individual Assistant) in order to determine the QoS profile and negotiate the QoS parameters in the new domain after the handover. Therefore, we use connectionist learning in the management of the negotiation profiles and agent technology to help the user choose the best service provider, dynamically negotiate the QoS on the user's behalf, and follow the user's behaviour to be able to anticipate the negotiation and manage renegotiation. The advance resource reservation is based on an object MSpec (Mobility Specification) which determines the future location of the mobile terminal. The MSpec object is a part of the mobility and QoS profile and is determined by the NIA in the mobile terminal. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

以太网无源光网络的服务质量分析

以太网无源光网络正成为当前光接入网研究的热点课题．本文重点研究了服务质量问题。在分析EPON系统QoS问题的基础上，利用优先级排队理论对基于QoS的DBA算法的性能进行了理论分析，指出DBA算法进一步优化的方向。     

QoS in best-effort networks

The QoS of today's best-effort network does not deliver the performance required for a wide range of interactive and multimedia applications that have demanding delay and bandwidth requirements. We discuss how current research into congestion control has uncovered that best-effort networks, with just a few modifications to the existing equipment, can deliver the performance required for a range of applications. Furthermore, we describe how best-effort networks lead to a pricing mechanism that charges users in accordance to the stress they place on the network.     

Partitioning QoS management for secure tactical wireless ad hoc networks

Addressing quality of service in military wireless ad hoc communication networks involves unique challenges due to imposed tactical requirements and,conditions, such as heterogeneous traffic with stringent-real-time and survivability requirements, mobile wireless nodes in hostile environments, and limited spectrum availability. Encryption adds another layer of complexity because of the partitioning of the network into plain text (unencrypted) and cipher text (encrypted) parts that, by definition, cannot communicate QoS information to one another. A typical communication shelter is composed of unencrypted LANs connected to a packet-encrypted backbone network. This article presents a partitioned QoS approach, focusing on QoS management at the unencrypted LAN that complements QoS management done at the encrypted backbone. Some of the unencrypted LAN QoS techniques being considered for the Warfighter Information Network-Tactical (the future Army tactical backbone network) are outlined.     

Multi‐step solution for QoS management in wireless mesh networks

Wireless mesh networks (WMNs) as community‐ and city‐wide type networks are required to extend their capability to offer real‐time multimedia services. While technologies exist to support quality of service (QoS) at node level, we propose here a network‐wide multi‐step solution to manage and offer QoS across a WMN. From a provider perspective, the provisioning and fulfillment of QoS‐based services fall under the realms of service management, network and traffic engineering functions. We describe the relevant functions required to design, implement and operate a WMN for providing a qualitative QoS to end‐users. Our proposed solution considers network planning aspects, including node placement, node clustering and frequency assignments, route discovery between ingress–egress points and appropriate QoS provisioning across the network. Route‐level QoS provisioning is defined as the process of allocating resources to the nodes along the identified routes to meet a priori known aggregated traffic demands in order to satisfy the QoS requirements for different types of application. Simulation and experimental tests are conducted to validate the correct behavior of processes/algorithms and to access the solution in achieving QoS for aggregate user traffic. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Jitter control in QoS networks

We study jitter control in networks with guaranteed quality of service (QoS) from the competitive analysis point of view: we propose on-line algorithms that control jitter and compare their performance to the best possible (by an off-line algorithm) for any given arrival sequence. For delay jitter, where the goal is to minimize the difference between delay times of different packets, we show that a simple on-line algorithm using a buffer of B slots guarantees the same delay jitter as the best off-line algorithm using buffer space B/2. We prove that the guarantees made by our on-line algorithm hold, even for simple distributed implementations, where the total buffer space is distributed along the path of the connection, provided that the input stream satisfies a certain simple property. For rate jitter, where the goal is to minimize the difference between inter-arrival times, we develop an on-line algorithm using a buffer of size 2B+h for any h⩾1, and compare its jitter to the jitter of an optimal off-line algorithm using buffer size B. We prove that our algorithm guarantees that the difference is bounded by a term proportional to B/h     

COPS-SLS usage for dynamic policy-based QoS management over heterogeneous IP networks

While each IP domain can deploy its own strategy to manage network resources, multimedia traffic needs end-to-end QoS management to obtain an overall service level. The provision of end-to-end QoS over a heterogeneous environment implies the negotiation of a mutually acceptable SLA. This article presents the use of the COPS-SLS protocol as a generic protocol for automatic service-level negotiation and the integration of this protocol in an overall QoS management architecture to manage service levels over multiple domains deploying different QoS technologies.     

基于社会属性的PSN消息路由算法

在PSN（pocket switched network）中实现数据传输成功率与传输延迟的有效平衡是当前有待解决的问题。提出一种基于社会属性的PSN路由算法——BridgingCom算法,该算法使用带有衰退机制的局部社区识别方法,引入桥接中心度（bridging centrality）作为中继节点的选择依据,将社会网络中节点重要性与移动社会网络的特征相结合,考虑了节点社区关系和节点活跃度对路由算法的影响。实验表明,该算法与现有经典算法相比能够获得较高的传输效率和较低的传输延迟。     

Measuring outages in telecommunications switched networks

The actions taken by end-users, service providers, standards bodies, and government and regulators agencies relating to network reliability and service outages are reviewed. End-to-end customer perceivable characteristics of network reliability and network outages are identified. The traditional definition of reliability is extended to include reliability of a telecommunication network and services. The fundamental concepts of network reliability are formulated. Network outages are defined and a framework for measuring network outages is presented. This framework is applied to the circuit switched network     

Self‐aware management of IP networks with QoS guarantees

Self‐aware management allows the network to react and to adapt to changes of situation. In this paper an architecture is described for self‐aware management of IP networks offering QoS guarantees. This architecture uses policy‐based management and multi‐agent systems. The originality of the present approach lies in the intention to give a real autonomy to the components intervening in the chain of services in terms of internal decisions and configuration. Our solution allows the self‐configuration, self‐provisioning and self‐monitoring of service as well as the proactive service level agreement management. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Experience with PACS in an ATM/Ethernet switched networkenvironment

Legacy local area network (LAN) technologies based on shared media concepts are not adequate for the growth of a large-scale picture archiving and communication system (PACS) in a client-server architecture. First, an asymmetric network load, due to the requests of a large number of PACS clients for only a few main servers, should be compensated by communication links to the servers with a higher bandwidth compared to the clients. Secondly, as the number of PACS nodes increases, the network throughput should not measurably cut production. These requirements can easily be fulfilled using switching technologies. Here asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) is clearly one of the hottest topics in networking because the ATM architecture provides integrated support for a variety of communication services, and it supports virtual networking. On the other hand, most of the imaging modalities are not yet ready for integration into a native ATM network. For a lot of nodes already joining an Ethernet, a cost-effective and pragmatic way to benefit from the switching concept would be a combined ATM/Ethernet switching environment. This incorporates an incremental migration strategy with the immediate benefits of high-speed, high-capacity ATM (for servers and high-sophisticated display workstations), while preserving elements of the existing network technologies. In addition, Ethernet switching instead of shared media Ethernet improves the performance considerably. The LAN emulation (LANE) specification by the ATM forum defines mechanisms that allow ATM networks to coexist with legacy systems using any data networking protocol. This paper points out the suitability of this network architecture in accordance with an appropriate system design     

Self-aware networks and QoS

Novel user-oriented networked systems will simultaneously exploit a variety of wired and wireless communication modalities to offer different levels of quality of service (QoS), including reliability and security to users, low economic cost, and performance. Within a single such user-oriented network, different connections themselves may differ from each other with respect to QoS needs. Similarly, the communication infrastructure used by such a network will, in general, be shared among many different networks and users so that the resources available will fluctuate over time, both on the long and short term. Such a user-oriented network will not usually have precise information about the infrastructure it is using at any given instant of time, so that its knowledge should be acquired from online observations. Thus, we suggest that user-oriented networks should exploit self-adaptiveness to try to obtain the best possible QoS for all their connections. In this paper we review experiments which illustrate how "self-awareness," through online self-monitoring and measurement, coupled with intelligent adaptive behavior in response to observations, can be used to offer user-oriented QoS. Our presentation is based on ongoing experimental work with several "cognitive packet network" testbeds that we have developed.