光突发交换网络中的传输控制协议性能

光突发交换(OBS)是IP over WDM核心网络采用的交换技术。在OBS网络中,送往同一边缘节点的IP分组汇聚成传输和交换的基本单元———数据突发(DB),DB丢弃会导致大量IP分组丢失,显著影响传输层的性能。文中分析OBS网络的参数对传输控制协议(TCP)吞吐量和时延的影响。仿真结果表明,DB丢包率越高,TCP性能越差。在低丢包率情况下,随着DB长度的增加,TCP吞吐量和端到端时延明显增加,高丢包率情况下则不明显;随着汇聚周期的增加,TCP吞吐量逐渐下降,端到端时延逐渐增加。     

Enhancing Fairness and Throughput of TCP in Heterogeneous Wireless Access Networks

Most of the recent research on TCP over heterogeneous wireless networks has concentrated on differentiating between packet drops caused by congestion and link errors, to avoid significant throughput degradations due to the TCP sending window being frequently shut down, in response to packet losses caused not by congestion but by transmission errors over wireless links. However, TCP also exhibits inherent unfairness toward connections with long round-trip times or traversing multiple congested routers. This problem is aggravated by the difference of bit-error rates between wired and wireless links in heterogeneous wireless networks. In this paper, we apply the TCP Bandwidth Allocation (TBA) algorithm, which we have proposed previously, to improve TCP fairness over heterogeneous wireless networks with combined wireless and wireline links. To inform the sender when congestion occurs, we propose to apply Wireless Explicit Congestion Notification (WECN). By controlling the TCP window behavior with TBA and WECN, congestion control and error-loss recovery are effectively separated. Further enhancement is also incorporated to smooth traffic bursts. Simulation results show that not only can the combined TBA and WECN mechanism improve TCP fairness, but it can maintain good throughput performance in the presence of wireless losses as well. A salient feature of TBA is that its main functions are implemented in the access node, thus simplifying the sender-side implementation.     

基于网络利用率最大化来提高无线Mesh网络中TCP协议的传输性能

In Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs), the performance of conventional TCP significantly deteriorates due to the unreliable wireless channel. To enhance TCP performance in WMNs, TCP/LT is proposed in this paper. It introduces fountain codes into packet reorganization in the protocol stack of mesh gateways and mesh clients. Furthermore, it is compatible with conventional TCP. Regarded as a Performance Enhancement Proxies (PEP), a mesh gateway buffers TCP packets into several blocks. It simultaneously processes them by using fountain encoders and then sends them to mesh clients. Apart from the improvement of the throughput of a unitary TCP flow, the entire network utility maximization can also be ensured by adjusting the scale of coding blocks for each TCP flow adaptively. Simulations show that TCP/LT presents high throughput gains over single TCP in lossy links of WMNs while preserving the fairness for multiple TCPs. As losses increase, the transmission delay of TCP/LT experiences a slow linear growth in contrast to the exponential growth of TCP.     

The impact of multihop wireless channel on TCP performance

This paper studies TCP performance in a stationary multihop wireless network using IEEE 802.11 for channel access control. We first show that, given a specific network topology and flow patterns, there exists an optimal window size W* at which TCP achieves the highest throughput via maximum spatial reuse of the shared wireless channel. However, TCP grows its window size much larger than W* leading to throughput reduction. We then explain the TCP throughput decrease using our observations and analysis of the packet loss in an overloaded multihop wireless network. We find out that the network overload is typically first signified by packet drops due to wireless link-layer contention, rather than buffer overflow-induced losses observed in the wired Internet. As the offered load increases, the probability of packet drops due to link contention also increases, and eventually saturates. Unfortunately the link-layer drop probability is insufficient to keep the TCP window size around W'*. We model and analyze the link contention behavior, based on which we propose link RED that fine-tunes the link-layer packet dropping probability to stabilize the TCP window size around W*. We further devise adaptive pacing to better coordinate channel access along the packet forwarding path. Our simulations demonstrate 5 to 30 percent improvement of TCP throughput using the proposed two techniques.     

Hierarchical cache design for enhancing TCP over heterogeneous networks with wired and wireless links

TCP is a reliable transport protocol tuned to perform well in traditional networks made up of links with low bit-error rates. Networks with higher bit-error rates, such as those with wireless links and mobile hosts, violate many of the assumptions made by the transmission control protocol (TCP), causing degraded end-to-end performance. We propose a two-layer hierarchical cache architecture for enhancing TCP performance over heterogeneous networks with both wired and wireless links. A new network-layer protocol, called new snoop (NS), is designed. The main idea is to cache the unacknowledged packets at both the mobile switch center (MSC) and base station (BS), to form a two-layer cache hierarchy. If a packet is lost due to transmission errors in the wireless link, the BS takes the responsibility to recover the loss. When a handoff occurs, the packets cached at the MSC can help to minimize the latency of retransmissions due to temporal disconnection. NS can preserve the end-to-end TCP semantics and is compatible with existing TCP applications. Its implementation only requires code modification at the BS and MSC. Simulation results show that NS is significantly more robust in dealing with unreliable wireless links and handoffs as compared with the original snoop scheme, as well as some other existing TCP enhancements.     

Adjusting the TCP Sending Rate and Retransmissions after Retransmission Timeouts Based on One-Way Queuing Delay in Wireless Mesh Network

Wireless Mesh Network (WMN) is regarded as a viable solution to provide broadband Internet access flexibly and cost efficiently. Improving the performance of Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) in WMNs is an active research area in the networking community. The existing solutions proposed for improving the TCP performance has concentrated on differentiating the DATA packet drops in the forward direction induced by both network congestion as well as transmission errors. However, the recent studies show that in WMNs packet drops occur not only in the forward direction but also in the reverse direction particularly due to hidden terminal, hidden capture terminal, link asymmetry etc. The loss of ACK packets in the reverse direction cause frequent retransmission timeouts subject to needless retransmissions and unnecessary slowing down the growth of congestion window, which causes the performance degradation of TCP. In this paper, we introduce a sender side TCP algorithm, called detection of packet loss (DPL), which is capable to distinguish the type of packet drops either DATA or ACKs caused by transmission errors as well as network congestion based on one-way queuing delay and react accordingly. To justify our contributions, we implement DPL in Qualnet simulator and compare its performance against existing TCP solutions via extensive simulations. Our simulation results show that the proposed algorithm can accurately distinguish the type of packet drops whether it is a DATA or ACK caused by transmission error or congestion and can significantly improve the performance under a wide range of scenarios in WMNs.     

Congestion–distortion optimized video transmission over ad hoc networks

The performance of low-latency video streaming with multipath routing over ad hoc networks is studied. As the available transmission rate of individual links in an ad hoc network is typically limited due to power and bandwidth constraints, a single node transmitting multimedia data may impact the overall network congestion and may therefore need to limit its rate while striving for the highest sustainable video quality. For this purpose, optimal routing algorithms which seek to minimize congestion by optimally distributing traffic over multiple paths are attractive. To predict the end-to-end rate-distortion tradeoff, we develop a model which captures both the impact of encoder quantization and of packet loss due to network congestion on the overall video quality. The validity of the model is confirmed by network simulations performed with different routing algorithms, latency requirements and encoding structures.     

Modeling TCP SACK performance over wireless channels with semi-reliable ARQ/FEC

Providing reliable data communications over wireless channels is a challenging task because time-varying wireless channel characteristics often lead to bit errors. These errors result in loss of IP packets and, consequently, TCP segments encapsulated into these packets. Since TCP cannot distinguish packet losses due to bit corruption from those due to network congestion, any packet loss caused by wireless channel impairments leads to unnecessary execution of the TCP congestion control algorithms and, hence, sub-optimal performance. Automatic Repeat reQuest (ARQ) and Forward Error Correction (FEC) try to improve communication reliability and reduce packet losses by detecting and recovering corrupted bits. Most analytical models that studied the effect of ARQ and FEC on TCP performance assumed that the ARQ scheme is perfectly persistent (i.e., completely reliable), thus a frame is always successfully transmitted irrespective of the number of transmission attempts it takes. In this paper, we develop an analytical cross-layer model for a TCP connection running over a wireless channel with a semi-reliable ARQ scheme, where the amount of transmission attempts is limited by some number. The model allows to evaluate the joint effect of stochastic properties of the wireless channel characteristics and various implementation-specific parameters on TCP performance, which makes it suitable for performance optimization studies. The input parameters include the bit error rate, the value of the normalized autocorrelation function of bit error observations at lag 1, the strength of the FEC code, the persistency of ARQ, the size of protocol data units at different layers, the raw data rate of the wireless channel, and the bottleneck link buffer size.     

Comprehensive performance analysis of a TCP session over a wireless fading link with queueing

A link model-driven approach toward transmission control protocol (TCP) performance over a wireless link is presented. TCP packet loss behavior is derived from an underlying two-state continuous time Markov model. The approach presented here is (to our knowledge) the first that simultaneously considers (1) variability of the round-trip delay due to buffer queueing; (2) independent and nonindependent (bursty) link errors; (3) TCP packet loss due to both buffer overflow and channel errors; and (4) the two modes of TCP packet loss detection (duplicate acknowledgments and timeouts). The analytical results are validated against simulations using the ns-2 simulator for a wide range of parameters; slow and fast fading links; small and large link bandwidth-delay products. For channels with memory, an empirical rule is presented for categorizing the impact of channel dynamics (fading rate) on TCP performance.     

TCP performance over wireless MIMO channels with ARQ and packet combining

Multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) wireless communication systems that employ multiple transmit and receive antennas can provide very high-rate data transmissions without increase in bandwidth or transmit power. For this reason, MIMO technologies are considered as a key ingredient in the next generation wireless systems, where provision of reliable data services for TCP/IP applications such as wireless multimedia or Internet is of extreme importance. However, while the performance of TCP has been extensively studied over different wireless links, little attention has been paid to the impact of MIMO systems on TCP. This paper provides an investigation on the performance of modern TCP systems when used over wireless channels that employ MIMO technologies. In particular, we focus on two representative categories of MIMO systems, namely, the BLAST systems and the space-time block coding (STBC) systems, and how the ARQ and packet combining techniques impact on the overall TCP performance. We show that, from the TCP throughput standpoint, a more reliable channel may be preferred over a higher spectral efficient but less reliable channel, especially under low SNR conditions. We also study the effect of antenna correlation on the TCP throughput under various conditions.     

Dynamics of TCP traffic over ATM networks

Investigates the performance of transport control protocol (TCP) connections over ATM networks without ATM-level congestion control and compares it to the performance of TCP over packet-based networks. For simulations of congested networks, the effective throughput of TCP over ATM can be quite low when cells are dropped at the congested ATM switch. The low throughput is due to wasted bandwidth as the congested link transmits cells from “corrupted” packets, i.e., packets in which at least one cell is dropped by the switch. The authors investigate two packet-discard strategies that alleviate the effects of fragmentation. Partial packet discard, in which remaining cells are discarded after one cell has been dropped from a packet, somewhat improves throughput. They introduce early packet discard, a strategy in which the switch drops whole packets prior to buffer overflow. This mechanism prevents fragmentation and restores throughput to maximal levels     

TCP Performance in IEEE 802.11-Based Ad Hoc Networks with Multiple Wireless Lossy Links

We propose a packet-level model to investigate the impact of channel error on the transmission control protocol (TCP) performance over IEEE-802.11-based multihop wireless networks. A Markov renewal approach is used to analyze the behavior of TCP Reno and TCP Impatient NewReno. Compared to previous work, our main contributions are listed as follows: 1) modeling multiple lossy links, 2) investigating the interactions among TCP, Internet Protocol (IP), and media access control (MAC) protocol layers, specifically the impact of 802.11 MAC protocol and dynamic source routing (DSR) protocol on TCP throughput performance, 3) considering the spatial reuse property of the wireless channel, the model takes into account the different proportions between the interference range and transmission range, and 4) adopting more accurate and realistic analysis to the fast recovery process and showing the dependency of throughput and the risk of experiencing successive fast retransmits and timeouts on the packet error probability. The analytical results are validated against simulation results by using GloMoSim. The results show that the impact of the channel error is reduced significantly due to the packet retransmissions on a per-hop basis and a small bandwidth delay product of ad hoc networks. The TCP throughput always deteriorates less than ~ 10 percent, with a packet error rate ranging from 0 to 0.1. Our model also provides a theoretical basis for designing an optimum long retry limit for IEEE 802.11 in ad hoc networks.     

A new ATM adaptation layer for TCP/IP over wireless ATM networks

This paper describes the design and performance of a new ATM adaptation layer protocol (AAL‐T) for improving TCP performance over wireless ATM networks. The wireless links are characterized by higher error rates and burstier error patterns in comparison with the fiber links for which ATM was introduced in the beginning. Since the low performance of TCP over wireless ATM networks is mainly due to the fact that TCP always responds to all packet losses by congestion control, the key idea in the design is to push the error control portion of TCP to the AAL layer so that TCP is only responsible for congestion control. The AAL‐T is based on a novel and reliable ARQ mechanism to support quality‐critical TCP traffic over wireless ATM networks. The proposed AAL protocol has been validated using the OPNET tool with the simulated wireless ATM network. The simulation results show that the AAL‐T provides higher throughput for TCP over wireless ATM networks compared to the existing approach of TCP with AAL 5. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Reducing web latency with coding-based fast multi-path loss recovery

Wireless Networks - TCP latency is critical to the performance of Web services. However, packet loss greatly impairs the TCP performance due to its poor loss recovery mechanisms. Recent work FUSO...     

Analytic models for the latency and steady-state throughput of TCP Tahoe, Reno, and SACK

Continuing the process of improvements made to TCP through the addition of new algorithms in Tahoe and Reno, TCP SACK aims to provide robustness to TCP in the presence of multiple losses from the same window. In this paper we present analytic models to estimate the latency and steady-state throughput of TCP Tahoe, Reno, and SACK and validate our models using both simulations and TCP traces collected from the Internet. In addition to being the first models for the latency of finite Tahoe and SACK flows, our model for the latency of TCP Reno gives a more accurate estimation of the transfer times than existing models. The improved accuracy is partly due to a more accurate modeling of the timeouts, evolution of cwnd during slow start and the delayed ACK timer. Our models also show that, under the losses introduced by the droptail queues which dominate most routers in the Internet, current implementations of SACK can fail to provide adequate protection against timeouts and a loss of roughly more than half the packets in a round will lead to timeouts. We also show that with independent losses SACK performs better than Tahoe and Reno and, as losses become correlated, Tahoe can outperform both Reno and SACK.     

TCP/IP performance with random loss and bidirectional congestion

With the growth in Internet access services over networks with asymmetric links such as asymmetric digital subscriber line (ADSL) and cable-based access networks, it becomes crucial to evaluate the performance of TCP/IP over systems in which the bottleneck link speed on the reverse path is considerably slower than that on the forward path. In this paper, we provide guidelines for designing network control mechanisms for supporting TCP/IP. We determine the throughput as a function of buffering, round-trip times, and normalized asymmetry (defined as the ratio of the transmission time of acknowledgment (ACK) in the reverse path to that of data packets in the forward path). We identify three modes of operation which are dependent on the forward buffer size and the normalized asymmetry, and determine the conditions under which the forward link is fully utilized. We also show that drop-from-front discarding of ACKs on the reverse link provides performance advantages over other drop mechanisms in use. Asymmetry increases the TCP already high sensitivity to random packet losses that occur on a time scale faster than the connection round-trip time. We generalize the by-now well-known relation relating the square root of the random loss probability to obtained TCP throughput, originally derived considering only data path congestion. Specifically, random loss leads to significant throughput deterioration when the product of the loss probability, the normalized asymmetry and the square of the bandwidth delay product is large. Congestion in the reverse path adds considerably to TCP unfairness when multiple connections share the reverse bottleneck link. We show how such problems can be alleviated by per-connection buffer and bandwidth allocation on the reverse path     

TCP-Jersey for wireless IP communications

Improving the performance of the transmission control protocol (TCP) in wireless Internet protocol (IP) communications has been an active research area. The performance degradation of TCP in wireless and wired-wireless hybrid networks is mainly due to its lack of the ability to differentiate the packet losses caused by network congestions from the losses caused by wireless link errors. In this paper, we propose a new TCP scheme, called TCP-Jersey, which is capable of distinguishing the wireless packet losses from the congestion packet losses, and reacting accordingly. TCP-Jersey consists of two key components, the available bandwidth estimation (ABE) algorithm and the congestion warning (CW) router configuration. ABE is a TCP sender side addition that continuously estimates the bandwidth available to the connection and guides the sender to adjust its transmission rate when the network becomes congested. CW is a configuration of network routers such that routers alert end stations by marking all packets when there is a sign of an incipient congestion. The marking of packets by the CW configured routers helps the sender of the TCP connection to effectively differentiate packet losses caused by network congestion from those caused by wireless link errors. This paper describes the design of TCP-Jersey, and presents results from experiments using the NS-2 network simulator. Results from simulations show that in a congestion free network with 1% of random wireless packet loss rate, TCP-Jersey achieves 17% and 85% improvements in goodput over TCP-Westwood and TCP-Reno, respectively; in a congested network where TCP flow competes with VoIP flows, with 1% of random wireless packet loss rate, TCP-Jersey achieves 9% and 76% improvements in goodput over TCP-Westwood and TCP-Reno, respectively. Our experiments of multiple TCP flows show that TCP-Jersey maintains the fair and friendly behavior with respect to other TCP flows.     

Delayed duplicate acknowledgements: a TCP‐Unaware approach to improve performance of TCP over wireless

Since a TCP sender cannot distinguish between packet losses arising from transmission errors from those due to congestion, TCP tends to perform poorly on wireless links that are prone to transmission errors. Several techniques have previously been proposed to improve TCP performance over wireless links. Existing schemes typically require an intermediate node (typically, a base station) to be TCP‐aware. For instance, the Snoop scheme requires the base station to interpret TCP headers and take appropriate action to help improve TCP performance. This paper proposes an alternative TCP‐unaware technique that attempts to mimic the behavior of the Snoop protocol. Performance evaluation shows that the proposed Delayed Dupacks scheme performs quite well. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Implementation of the Broad band User AccessNetwork and the Study of the Key Algorithm for Improving the Performance of Asymmetrical Networks

This thesis is based on the design and development of ADSL access networks. We h ave completed the hardware and software functions in two main ADSL equipments: A TU C and ATU R. With the system design, we carry out researches to find out ef fective methods to improved performance in the following aspects: (a) how to all ocate limited bandwith among services with different QoS requirements and (b) what is the effect of asymmetric links on TCP end to end flow control mech anism. We make detailed analyses and propose useful solutions to those problems we find. The main contents of this thesis are as follows: (1) the design and rea l ization of ADSL access system. This part includes the principles of ADSL access technology, ADSL broadband access network architecture, and ATM over ADSL protoc ol models that we use in our system. We give detailed hardware and software desi gn steps in this part, and list system testing results to show the system perfor mance. In our hardware, the CPU is a RISC microprocessor. Combined with a high speed digital signal processor, the whole system can hold high reliability. Our software design platform is a Psos multi task real time operation system. We h ave developed a series of hardware drivers besides other tasks for high level co ntrol and interruption processing. Currently, our system has reached the expecte d performance under test environment. Our next step is the development of DSLAM and in this part we give a feasible design scheme. (2) Packet scheduling policy I n ADSL system. In order to optimize ATU R performance, we need a scheduling pol icy to regulate the order and number of packet output to the uplink. For this pu rpose, we study the scheduling algorithm design methods in a single network node and their performance. After studying the existing algorithms carefully, we fir st conclude certain important design principles and criterions for scheduling po licy evaluation. And then by using service curve function, we make detailed perf ormance analysis of a typical scheduling policy — the earliest deadline first. The advantage of characterizing service by using a function is that the service curve can provide a wide spectrum of service characterization. With this method, we first develop a generalized algorithm for calculating the deadlines used in the service curve based on the earliest deadline first policy, and then design a simplified computing program for an important curve. After that, holding fair b andwidth allocation and packet deadline guarantee as policy evaluation standards , we analyze this scheduling policy performance and propose solutions to those p roblems that we find. Finally, we, in theory, prove these improving algorithms. All these solutions and algorithms we design in this part are now under developm ent in real systems and will enhance system performance. (3) Effects of asymmetr I c links on TCP performance and solutions. TCP is a widely used transmission cont rol protocol. It regulates its forward data sending through reverse ACKs. What a re the new problems to its flow control mechanism on asymmetric links and how to solve them are the two main points of this part. We first study the relationshi p between normalized bandwidth ratio, link buffer capacity and TCP link throughp ut under asymmetric link models. We find that TCP ack transportation on slow bac kward link is a key reason that causes the problems in TCP asymmetric links. Ser ving this as a start point, we present several improving solutions to TCP flow c ontrol algorithm and test them through simulation. Besides, TCP has been widely implemented in many networks. To give compatibility with current TCP end users, we use scheduling solutions to regulate data packet and ack packet transmission ratio onto uplinks. In the theoretical analysis of several typical scheduling po licies, we find a feasible algorithm to control TCP data efficiency on asymmetri c links. Finally, we prove those analyses and propose algorithm through simulati on.     

改善卫星融合网络随机丢包和间歇性中断的方法研究*1

当移动自组织网用户通过网关经卫星网络发送数据时,存在卫星链路的长传播时延、随机丢包以及移动终端的移动性引起链接的间歇性中断,导致TCP触发拥塞控制机制而降低传输性能降低。针对以上卫星网络的特点,提出了TCP M-Veno方法。在发送端对TCP Veno进行优化改进使得它能够缓解卫星网络中长的传播时延和随机丢包的影响。在网关中结合M-TCP算法来解决卫星融合网络移动终端间歇性中断。仿真表明,所提出的TCP M-Veno比NewReno、Veno以及M-TCP有更好的传输性能。