A framework for designing ATM management systems by way of abstract information models and distributed object architectures

ATM network management has not yet reached the level of versatility and comprehensiveness exhibited by other aspects of this networking technology. Since the currently dominant general standards for broadband network management, primarily targeted towards large carrier networks, are too complex and intricate for smaller environments, e.g. LANs or corporate networks, ATM equipment manufacturers, in their effort to provide systems that exploit the power of ATM and yet remain practical and simple, usually resort to devising ad hoc proprietary extensions of simpler management frameworks, originally developed for other networking technologies. Such incompatible extensions, however, remain useless in the common case where the network is heterogeneous. The notion of abstract information modeling may be employed for improving on this situation.Building on this concept, the paper proposes a framework for developing ATM management systems intended for heterogeneous small- to medium-size networks. The general guidelines are illustrated through discussing a specific compliant management application intended for the remote monitoring of ATM network platforms and developed in the framework of a European research project. The application features a WWW interface and, as such, provides an example of the compatibility of information abstraction with the Web-based management techniques and of the benefits arising from the combination of the two notions.Lastly, and as the concept of abstracting information is inherent to recent frameworks for designing and programming distributed object systems, the paper explores this relation by discussing an alternative design of the monitoring application as a distributed object system.     

A Model-Based Performance Management Tool for ATM and Frame Relay Networks

In this paper we describe a network modelingapproach intended to assist in the performancemanagement, design, and optimization of broadbandtraffic networks. Switch and source models, as well asrouting optimization and decision support algorithmshave been integrated in a prototype software tool,called DATANMOT (Data Network Modeling and OptimizationTool). The switch models developed are based on standard Frame Relay and ATM switch implementations.Specifically, an analytical model of the Fujitsu FETEX150 ATM switch is described here in detail. Fluid-flowapproximation methods were used for performance evaluation, with computational complexity lowenough for near-real time applications. As a result,given the network configuration and input traffic, anevaluation of the quality of service can be derived and used in optimal routing, admission controland network planning. These techniques have beenincorporated in our modeling tool to demonstrate themodel-based approach to network management. In addition, all configuration, modeling, and managementfunctions of the software tool are supported by agraphical user interface, and a databasesystem.     

Thermal management in laminated die system

The thermal control of a die is crucial for the development of high efficiency injection moulds. For an effective thermal management, this research provides a strategy to identify a thermal dynamic model and to design a controller. The neural network techniques and finite element analysis enable modeling to deal with various cycle-times for moulding process and uncertain dynamics of a die. Based on the system identification which is experimentally validated using a real system, controllers are designed using fuzzy-logic and self-tuning PID methods with backpropagation and radial basis function neural networks to tune control parameters. Through a comparative study, each controller’s performance is verified in terms of response time and tracking accuracy under different moulding processes with multiple cycle-times.     

Survivable ATM mesh networks: Techniques and performance evaluation

The Capacity and Flow Assignment problem in self-healing ATM networks is an interesting one from a Generalized Multi-Protocol Label Switching (GMPLS) prospective since IP and ATM protocols are destined to co-exist together in this unified platform. This paper continues the investigation of the path-based design approach of the network survivability problem in existing ATM mesh networks. Our contribution consists in quantifying (1) the effects the selection of candidate paths per node pair has on the restoration ratio, (2) the effect of restoration schemes on the restoration ratio, (3) the effect of failure scenarios on the restoration ratio, and finally (4) the effect of network connectivity on the restoration ratio. Numerical results are presented under representative network topologies, various traffic demands and spare capacity distribution schemes. They provide additional guidelines for the design of survivable ATM mesh-type networks, from a network reliability viewpoint.     

Impact of QOS requirements on video coding for ATM networks

The broadband integrated services digital networks (B-ISDN) based on asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) technology can support a wide range of applications such as voice, video, still images, and data. Compression techniques increase the effective bandwidth utilization, but the bursty and asynchronous nature of the traffic can still lead to congestion in the network, and degradation of image quality and quality of service (QOS). Some of the features to provide better coding schemes for ATM networks are layered coding, resynchronization, buffering, interleaved schemes, constrained bit rate due to buffers, encapsulation with the RTP or AAL1 for clock recovery, lapped transforms, motion compensation, and optimal bit allocation for coders based on wavelet transforms. We review various techniques forimage and video coding such as transforms, motion compensation, vector quantization, and subband coding. We outline the impact of the cell loss ratio (CLR), delay and cell delay variation (CDV) on video coding: blocking effects, loss of frame synchronization, motion vectors, and vector quantization codewords. The open problems include tuning coding parameters to the available QOS provided by the network.     

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     

Fast setup of end-to-end paths for bandwidth constrained applications in an IP/MPLS–ATM integrated environment

Transport networks are currently being moved towards a model of high performance Internet Protocol/Multiprotocol Label Switching (IP/MPLS) routers interconnected through intelligent core networks. Currently, Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) technology has been widely deployed in several network backbones along with the Private Network-to-Network Interface (PNNI) protocols as the control plane. In order to cope with the increasing Internet traffic demands in the current context, fast setup of end-to-end paths with the required Quality of Service (QoS) is necessary.This paper analyzes the case of two IP/MPLS networks interconnected through an ATM core network, assuming MPLS as the mechanism to provide Traffic Engineering in the IP networks, and a PNNI-based control plane in the core network. This paper aims to define a mechanism needed to set up a fast end-to-end QoS Label Switched Path (LSP) between two Label Switched Routers (LSRs) belonging to different IP/MPLS domains. First, the fast end-to-end setup is achieved by modifying the network backbone control plane. Second, two different aggregation schemes are proposed to summarize the QoS network state information to be transported through the ATM core network. Therefore, both the efficient aggregation schemes and the fast mechanism allow source routing to set up a path faster than the existing methods and to reduce the blocking probability using a summary of the available resource information.     

Genetic algorithm-based neural fuzzy decision tree for mixed scheduling in ATM networks

Future broadband integrated services networks based on asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) technology are expected to support multiple types of multimedia information with diverse statistical characteristics and quality of service (QoS) requirements. To meet these requirements, efficient scheduling methods are important for traffic control in ATM networks. Among general scheduling schemes, the rate monotonic algorithm is simple enough to be used in high-speed networks, but does not attain the high system utilization of the deadline driven algorithm. However, the deadline driven scheme is computationally complex and hard to implement in hardware. The mixed scheduling algorithm is a combination of the rate monotonic algorithm and the deadline driven algorithm; thus it can provide most of the benefits of these two algorithms. In this paper, we use the mixed scheduling algorithm to achieve high system utilization under the hardware constraint. Because there is no analytic method for schedulability testing of mixed scheduling, we propose a genetic algorithm-based neural fuzzy decision tree (GANFDT) to realize it in a real-time environment. The GANFDT combines a GA and a neural fuzzy network into a binary classification tree. This approach also exploits the power of the classification tree. Simulation results show that the GANFDT provides an efficient way of carrying out mixed scheduling in ATM networks.     

An architecture for managing virtual circuit and virtual path services in ATM networks

ATM networks rely on the Virtual Circuit (VC) and Virtual Path (VP) concepts to provide unicast connection-oriented services with Quality of Service (QoS) guarantees. This paper presents a model for managing the configuration and performance of the VC and VP services in these networks. The model consists of a connection management architecture that provides the services and is instrumented for network management purposes, and a network management architecture that uses the OSI management model to provide access to the appropriate service monitoring and control functions. The network management architecture proposes complete managed object definitions that achieve a variety of monitoring and control objectives: service configuration, service performance at the call and cell level, and service control. The latter includes the capability to establish VPs and control their allocated networking capacity and also control parameters of the signaling system that affect the performance of the VC service. The architecture was implemented in its entirety on the Xunet ATM testbed, and several experiments were conducted to illustrate the trade-off between the throughput of the VC service and the allocation of capacity to VPs. The experiments further demonstrated that the signaling system can create throughput bottlenecks in the absence of VPs in the network, and therefore, the network operator can increase performance by controlling the VP distribution.     

Learning-based resource optimization in asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) networks

This paper tackles the issue of bandwidth allocation in asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) networks using recently developed tools of computational intelligence. The efficient bandwidth allocation technique implies effective resources utilization of the network. The fluid flow model has been used effectively among other conventional techniques to estimate the bandwidth for a set of connections. However, such methods have been proven to be inefficient at times in coping with varying and conflicting bandwidth requirements of the different services in ATM networks. This inefficiency is due to the computational complexity of the model. To overcome this difficulty, many approximation-based solutions, such as the fluid flow approximation technique, were introduced. Although such solutions are simple, in terms of computational complexity, they nevertheless suffer from potential inaccuracies in estimating the required bandwidth. Soft computing-based bandwidth controllers, such as neural networks- and neurofuzzy-based controllers, have been shown to effectively solve an indeterminate nonlinear input-output (I-O) relations by learning from examples. Applying these techniques to the bandwidth allocation problem in ATM network yields a flexible control mechanism that offers a fundamental tradeoff for the accuracy-simplicity dilemma.     

On the design of secure ATM networks

Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) is seen to be a technology that allows flexibility, efficiency and manageable bandwidth on demand to be achieved in high-speed networks. ATM is able to support a variety of applications including voice, video, image and data with different quality of service requirements. This paper addresses the design and implementation of security services and mechanisms in ATM networks. The paper examines the various design options for the placement of security services within the ATM protocol reference model and considers their advantages and disadvantages. The option of placing the security layer between the ATM Adaptation Layer (AAL) and the ATM layer is selected and the design of security services such as confidentiality, integrity and data origin authentication services in the user plane are described. The paper then presents an authentication scheme and key establishment protocol. This protocol is integrated with the existing ATM signaling protocols as part of the call setup procedures in the control plane. Then the paper discusses a public key infrastructure for the ATM environment and considers the design of public key management protocols between ATM nodes and Certification Authority for initializing, retrieving and distributing public key certificates. Finally, the paper considers the design of access control service for ATM networks and discusses the issues involved in the provision of access control mechanisms both at the connection setup phase and during the user data transfer phase. It seems that the developed security design can be transparently integrated to secure ATM networks.     

Modeling and performance analysis of ad hoc broadcasting schemes

Broadcasting is a technique widely used for distributing control packets in ad hoc networks. The traditional flooding scheme has been proven to unnecessarily consume network capacity and may lead to severe packet collisions in high-density networks. New schemes have been proposed for alleviating this so-called broadcast storm problem and their efficiencies are usually analyzed and compared by ns-2 simulations. However, little work has been done on mathematical modeling and rigorous analysis. In this paper, we focus on two popular ad hoc broadcasting schemes and provide their detailed analysis in one-dimensional and two-dimensional ideal networks. The statistical results obtained have revealed new relationships between network parameters and the performance metrics. These results are useful for optimally setting network parameters in designing protocols. It is also expected that the analytical methods developed will lay a solid foundation for the development of mathematical models for other ad hoc broadcast and multicast schemes.     

Open Signaling for ATM Networks: A Vexed Question of Performance

Based on a clear separation between switching hardware and control software, the concept of open signaling creates an open programmable networking environment in which network entities can be realized as high level software objects with well-defined interfaces. This underlying architecture facilitates the creation of multiple mechanisms of network control, supporting applications for connection management. The feasibility of a connection management framework however depends mainly on the performance of CORBA because of binding overheads associated with remote invocations. It has been proposed that an implementation with reasonable performance may require certain criteria to be integrated into the design, including caching of network states, aggregation of access to the switch server object, and parallel processing of a single call request. This paper considers the effectiveness of these design criteria and the associated performance issues of a connection management system for ATM networks.     

Intelligent Agents for ATM Network Control and Resource Management: Experiences and Results from an Implementation on a Network Testbed

This paper presents the architecture and implementation of a distributed multi-agent system designed to provide flexible control and efficient resource management of a communications network. The system architecture enables different service providers and the network provider to use different control algorithms on the same logically partitioned physical infrastructure. All the mechanisms have been implemented and successfully tested on real experimental telecommunications networks. The system components are first described and then results from experiments and performance issues are discussed. The problem of interfacing a multi-agent system to network devices is then discussed. Interfacing agents with the network requires some form of programmable interface, since it is necessary, for example, to override conventional ATM signaling. At the moment programmable network device interfaces are not always available, particularly in commercially available devices and, thus, generic operations using management protocols have to be used. A generic architecture for embedding custom network control functionality into ATM networks is described.     

A new algorithm for virtual path network design in ATM networks

Virtual paths (VPs) in an ATM network form a logical network, called VP network (VPN), over the underlying physical network. VPN allows flexible management of network resources and hence its design is an important issue in designing an ATM network. In this paper, we consider the VPN design problem which is formulated as an optimization problem with the objective of minimizing the switching and transmission cost, and control and management cost. We present here, a two-phase heuristic solution for designing a good VPN for a given traffic demand. The first phase is a routing phase in which a route is found between every node pair in the network. In the second phase, paths are selected as VPs using the set of routes generated in the routing phase. A path is selected as a VP so as to minimize the following parameters: (i) the total number of VPs configured; (ii) the number of VPs carried by a link (load); and (iii) the VP hopcount, the number of VPs that are concatenated to form a virtual channel (VC). We study the performance of the proposed algorithm through extensive simulation on various networks. The results show that the VPN generated by the proposed algorithm is good in minimizing the number of VPs configured, the load on a link, and the VP hopcount. The comparison of the results obtained by the proposed algorithm and that of Ahn et al. [Virtual path layout design in ATM networks, in: Proceedings of IEEE INFCOM’94, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, 1994, pp. 192–200] shows that our algorithm performs better.     

Models for network design,servicing and monitoring of ATM networks based on the virtual path concept

Virtual Path (VP) concept has gained attention in terms of effective deployment of ATM networks for wide-area environment. In this paper, we present models and algorithms for network design and management of ATM networks based on virtual path concept from a network planning perspective. Our approach is based on statistical multiplexing of traffic within a traffic class by using a virtual path for the class and deterministic multiplexing of different virtual paths, and on providing dynamic bandwidth and reconfigurability through virtual path concept depending on traffic load during the course of the day. For some realistic example networks, we observe that considering network dynamism through variation of traffic during the course of a day by doing dynamic bandwidth and virtual path reconfiguration can save between 10 to 14% in network design costs compared to a static network based on maximum busy hour traffic.     

无线ATM网络体系结构及MAC层协议研究

无线ATM网络作为宽带多媒体通信的一种解决方案,近年来得到了广泛的研究。基于高速率、高可靠性的光纤信道的ATM网络扩展到无线环境面临着许多问题。本文介绍了无线ATM网络体系结构、协议栈、应用特点和关键技术,并重点讨论了无线ATM网络的MAC层协议。     

Packet video transport in ATM networks with single-bit feedback

The promise of a broadband integrated service digital network has led to the design of mechanisms for efficient transport of real-time compressed video in packet switching networks. We examine feedback control for video transport in ATM networks where the available feedback is a single bit of information carried in the cell header. We investigate the performance of three single-bit schemes for source rate adaptation. Two were originally for congestion control of bursty data traffic and are modified to control video traffic. The third scheme conveys more information about the state of queue(s) at the bottleneck. The simulation results show that all three schemes for feedback control of VBR video streams work remarkably well. During severe network congestion, the signal quality degrades gracefully, but not uniformly across all connections. Based on insights from the initial simulations, we propose a scheme to improve the fairness of service and demonstrate its effectiveness.     

基于速率的反馈拥塞控制的最优化问题研究

基于速率的反馈拥塞控制用于ＡＴＭ网络中可用位速率（ＡＢＲ）流量控制。可用位速率业务需要最优和稳定的流量控制器来保证高的吞吐量和保证网络的稳定性。本文采用线性控制理论来设计基于速率的流量控制器。这个控制器是一个简单的比例控制器,使用品质因数来优化参数。文中证实了最优化控制器对系统参数的最小依赖性。     

高速计算机网络中拥塞控制系统设计方法综述

未来的计算机网络将是一种能够提供多种不同 服务,以支持多种不同应用需求,有着集成服务支持能力的高速分组交换网络．为充分提高 该类网络性能,设计一个高效的拥塞控制系统是一个关键问题;而速率调节算法的设计好坏 直接影响拥塞控制系统的性能．为此,本文以ATM网络中的相关研究为背景,首次从控制理 论的角度系统地分析和论述了高速网络中拥塞控制系统的组成并着重分析了其速率调节算法 的设计方法．对目前已经提出的各种典型速率调节算法进行了对比分析和分类阐述,为进一 步研究提出了新的课题和思路．