Dynamic inter-SLA resource sharing in path-oriented differentiated services networks

This paper proposes novel resource sharing schemes for differentiated services (DiffServ) networks, to achieve both high resource utilization and quality of service (QoS) guarantee. Service level agreements (SLAs) are negotiated at network boundaries and supported by path-oriented resource mapping within the network. The recently proposed SLA management scheme based on virtual partitioning (Bouillet et al., 2002) allows overloaded SLAs to exploit the spare capacity of underloaded SLAs for efficient resource utilization, however, at the the cost of possible SLA violation of the underloaders. In the bandwidth borrowing scheme proposed here, the dedicated bandwidth for underloaded SLAs is determined and adaptively adjusted at network boundaries according to the actual traffic load and QoS policies; the available spare capacity is then properly distributed to related links for lending to others. On the other hand, the traffic flows admitted with borrowed bandwidth are tagged and may be preempted later when the original bandwidth owner needs to claim back the resources. Through a detailed implementation design and extensive computer simulation results we show that, by bandwidth borrowing, both SLA compliance and high resource utilization can be achieved in various load conditions, with some side benefits such as call-level service differentiation, small admission overhead, and convenience for policy-based management. In addition, we propose a distributed bandwidth pushing scheme that can dynamically adjust the spare bandwidth distribution over the network. Combining bandwidth pushing with bandwidth borrowing, the resource utilization can be further improved.     

Efficient Resource Allocation for Policy-Based Wireless/Wireline Interworking

This paper proposes efficient resource allocation techniques for a policy-based wireless/wireline interworking architecture, where quality of service (QoS) provisioning and resource allocation is driven by the service level agreement (SLA). For end-to-end IP QoS delivery, each wireless access domain can independently choose its internal resource management policies to guarantee the customer access SLA (CASLA), while the border-crossing traffic is served by a core network following policy rules to meet the transit domain SLA (TRSLA). Particularly, we propose an engineered priority resource sharing scheme for a voice/data integrated wireless domain, where the policy rules allow cellular-only access or cellular/WLAN interworked access. By such a resource sharing scheme, the CASLA for each service class is met with efficient resource utilization, and the interdomain TRSLA bandwidth requirement can be easily determined. In the transit domain, the traffic load fluctuation from upstream access domains is tackled by an inter-TRSLA resource sharing technique, where the spare capacity from underloaded TRSLAs can be exploited by the overloaded TRSLAs to improve resource utilization. Advantages of the inter-SLA resource sharing technique are that the core network service provider can freely design the policy rules that define underload and overload status, determine the bandwidth reservation, and distribute the spare resources among bandwidth borrowers, while all the policies are supported by a common set of resource allocation techniques.     

Measurement-Based Admission Control at Edge Routers

It is very important to allocate and manage resources for multimedia traffic flows with real-time performance requirements in order to guarantee quality of service (QoS). In this paper, we develop a scalable architecture and an algorithm for admission control of real-time flows. Since individual management of each traffic flow on each transit router can cause a fundamental scalability problem in both data and control planes, we consider that each flow is classified at the ingress router and data traffic is aggregated according to the class inside the core network as in a DiffServ framework. In our approach, admission decision is made for each flow at the edge (ingress) routers, but it is scalable because per-flow states are not maintained and the admission algorithm is simple. In the proposed admission control scheme, an admissible bandwidth, which is defined as the maximum rate of a flow that can be accommodated additionally while satisfying the delay performance requirements for both existing and new flows, is calculated based on the available bandwidth measured by edge routers. The admissible bandwidth is a threshold for admission control, and thus, it is very important to accurately estimate the admissible bandwidth. The performance of the proposed algorithm is evaluated by taking a set of simulation experiments using bursty traffic flows.     

Simulation analyses of weighted fair bandwidth‐on‐demand (WFBoD) process for broadband multimedia geostationary satellite systems

Advanced resource management schemes are required for broadband multimedia satellite networks to provide efficient and fair resource allocation while delivering guaranteed quality of service (QoS) to a potentially very large number of users. Such resource management schemes must provide well‐defined service segregation to the different traffic flows of the satellite network, and they must be integrated with some connection admission control (CAC) process at least for the flows requiring QoS guarantees. Weighted fair bandwidth‐on‐demand (WFBoD) is a resource management process for broadband multimedia geostationary (GEO) satellite systems that provides fair and efficient resource allocation coupled with a well‐defined MAC‐level QoS framework (compatible with ATM and IP QoS frameworks) and a multi‐level service segregation to a large number of users with diverse characteristics. WFBoD is also integrated with the CAC process. In this paper, we analyse via extensive simulations the WFBoD process in a bent‐pipe satellite network. Our results show that WFBoD can be used to provide guaranteed QoS for both non‐real‐time and real‐time variable bit rate (VBR) flows. Our results also show how to choose the main parameters of the WFBoD process depending on the system parameters and on the traffic characteristics of the flows. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Optimized routing for providing ethernet LAN services

Ethernet's-move into metropolitan and wide area networks is driving a rapidly growing market opportunity. Current Ethernet services come in two basic flavors, Ethernet line and LAN, providing point-to-point and multipoint connectivity, respectively. The LAN services, although more cost effective, are lagging behind in deployments due to associated QoS and bandwidth provisioning issues. The Ethernet service provider needs to provision the network to meet current and future traffic demands, where the traffic is unpredictable and bursty. The goal is to minimize. overprovisioning and complexity. To add to the challenge, Ethernet routing is based on simple self-learning and relies on spanning tree routing. In this article we propose an Ethernet-specific load balanced routing mechanism, which is robust to dynamic traffic demand. It significantly reduces overprovisioning, is simple and static, and requires only bandwidth profiles associated with service level agreements at the ingress and egress links. Our simulation results show that our scheme provides performance improvements over a recently proposed approach for switched Ethernet as well as a related load balancing approach for Ethernet over MPLS networks.     

Scheduler for IEEE 802.16 networks

The IEEE 802.16 standard was designed to support real-time and bandwidth demanding applications with quality of service (QoS). Although the standard defines a QoS signaling framework and five service levels, scheduling disciplines for these service levels are unspecified. In this paper, we propose a scheduling scheme for the uplink traffic which is fully standard-compliant and can be easily implemented in the base station. Simulation results show that this scheme is able to meet the QoS requirements of the service flows.     

QoS management through service level agreements: a short overview

The Internet protocol (IP) was created as a connectionless network layer protocol that takes no attempt to distinguish between various application types. Hence, the integration of a wide range of telecommunication services over the Internet is the main reason behind the need for the provision of quality of service (QoS) guarantees to end users. In such multiservice networks, resources are managed based on service level agreements (SLA), acknowledging different types of traffic in terms of bandwidth requirements, delay and other QoS parameters. An SLA is the documented result of a negotiation between a customer and a service provider that defines service characteristics, responsibilities and priorities of every party. An SLA may include statements about tariffing and billing, service delivery, and compensations. This paper provides a short overview of some aspects of quality of service, and identifies main issues and problems of defining and managing an SLA, based on its current standardization stage.     

Adaptive Call Admission Control for QoS/Revenue Optimization in CDMA Cellular Networks

In this paper, we show how online management of both quality of service (QoS) and provider revenue can be performed in CDMA cellular networks by adaptive control of system parameters to changing traffic conditions. The key contribution is the introduction of a novel call admission control and bandwidth degradation scheme for real-time traffic as well as the development of a Markov model for the admission controller. This Markov model incorporates important features of 3G cellular networks, such as CDMA intra- and inter-cell interference, different call priorities and soft handover. From the results of the Markov model the threshold for maximal call degradation is periodically adjusted according to the currently measured traffic in the radio access network. As a consequence, QoS and revenue measures can be optimized with respect to a predefined goal. To illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed QoS/revenue management approach, we present quantitative results for the Markov model and a comprehensive simulation study considering a half-day window of a daily usage pattern.     

A scalable monitoring approach based on aggregation and refinement

Network monitoring is an integral part of any network management system. In order to ensure end-to-end service quality stated in service level agreements (SLAs), managers of a service provider network need to gather quality-of-service (QoS) measurements from multiple nodes in the network. For a large network with over thousands of flows with end-to-end SLAs, the information exchanged between network nodes and a central network management system (NMS) could be substantial. We propose a mechanism called aggregation and refinement based monitoring (ARM) to reduce the amount of information exchange. ARM is a generic mechanism that can be configured to run with different objectives, including threshold-based, rank-based and percentile-based. The mechanism enables the NMS to collect data from network nodes using a dynamic QoS data aggregation/refinement technique, and to process these information differently depending on its measurement objective. Our simulation results show that for these various objectives, the selective refinement process is able to validate SLAs quickly, is an order of magnitude more efficient than a simple polling scheme, and performs well across a wide range of traffic loads     

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.     

FEBA: A Bandwidth Allocation Algorithm for Service Differentiation in IEEE 802.16 Mesh Networks

In wireless mesh networks, the end-to-end throughput of traffic flows depends on the path length, i.e., the higher the number of hops, the lower becomes the throughput. In this paper, a fair end-to-end bandwidth allocation (FEBA) algorithm is introduced to solve this problem. FEBA is implemented at the medium access control (MAC) layer of single-radio, multiple channels IEEE 802.16 mesh nodes, operated in a distributed coordinated scheduling mode. FEBA negotiates bandwidth among neighbors to assign a fair share proportional to a specified weight to each end-to-end traffic flow. This way traffic flows are served in a differentiated manner, with higher priority traffic flows being allocated more bandwidth on the average than the lower priority traffic flows. In fact, a node requests/grants bandwidth from/to its neighbors in a round-robin fashion where the amount of service depends on both the load on its different links and the priority of currently active traffic flows. If multiple channels are available, they are all shared evenly in order to increase the network capacity due to frequency reuse. The performance of FEBA is evaluated by extensive simulations. It is shown that wireless resources are shared fairly among best-effort traffic flows, while multimedia streams are provided with a differentiated service that enables quality of service.     

Efficient medium arbitration of FSAN‐compliant GPONs

The steadily rising demand for multimedia and data services, the falling cost and omnipresence of Ethernet and the maturity of passive optical networks (PON) technology, promise to radically change the landscape in the local loop. The heart of a gigabit PON system (recently standardized by FSAN/ITU) is the medium access controller (MAC), which arbitrates access to the upstream link among users with fluctuating traffic demands and effects the multiplexing and concentration policy. At the same time, it has to safeguard the service quality and enforce the parameters agreed in the service level agreements (SLAs) between the users and the service provider. In this paper, a MAC protocol designed to serve any mix of services according to their quality of service (QoS) needs, employing four priority levels along with a high number of logically separate data queues is presented. The architecture and implementation in hardware of a MAC algorithm capable of allocating bandwidth down to a resolution of a byte with QoS differentiation is the focus of this paper. It employs the bandwidth arbitration tools of the FSAN/ITU G.984.3 standard and maps SLA parameters to GPON service parameters to create an efficient, fair and flexible residential access system. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

A low-state packet marking framework for approximate fair bandwidth allocation

Misbehaving, non-congestion-reactive traffic is on the rise in the Internet. One way to control misbehaving traffic is to enforce local fairness among flows. Locally fair policies, such as fair-queueing and other fair AQM schemes, are inadequate to simultaneously control misbehaving traffic and provide high network utilization. We thus need to enforce globally fair bandwidth allocations. However, such schemes have typically been stateful and complex to implement and deploy. In this letter, we present a low state, lightweight scheme based on stateless fair packet marking at network edges followed by RIO queueing at core nodes, to control misbehaving flows with more efficient utilization of network bandwidth. Additionally, with low-state feedback from bottleneck routers, we show that, in practice, we can approximate global max-min fairness within an island of routers. We show, using simulations, that we can indeed control misbehaving flows and provide more globally fair bandwidth allocation.     

Supporting multi-user real-time VBR video service using dynamic bandwidth management based on prediction

Real-time variable bit rate (VBR) video is expected to take a significant portion of multimedia applications. However, plentiful challenges to VBR video service provision have been raised for its characteristic of high traffic abruptness. To support multi-user real-time VBR video transmission with high bandwidth utilization and satisfied quality of service (QoS), this article proposes a practical dynamic bandwidth management scheme. This scheme forecasts future media rate of VBR video by employing time-domain adaptive linear predictor and using media delivery index (MDI) as both QoS measurement and complementary management reference. In addition, to support multi-user application, an adjustment priorities classified strategy is also put forward. Finally, a test-bed based on this management scheme is established. The experimental results demonstrate that the scheme proposed in this article is efficient with bandwidth utilization increased by 20%-60% compared to a fixed service rate and QoS guaranteed.     

Design and analysis of a denial-of-service-resistant quality-of-service signaling protocol for MANETs

Quality-of-service (QoS) signaling protocols for mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) are highly vulnerable to attacks. In particular, a class of denial-of-service (DoS) attacks can severely cripple network performance with relatively little effort expended by the attacker. A distributed QoS signaling protocol that is resistant to a class of DoS attacks on signaling is proposed. The signaling protocol provides QoS for real-time traffic and employs mechanisms at the medium access control (MAC) layer, which serve to avoid potential attacks on network resource usage. The key MAC layer mechanisms that provide support for the QoS signaling scheme include sensing of available bandwidth, traffic policing, and rate monitoring, all of which are performed in a distributed manner by the mobile nodes. The proposed signaling scheme achieves a compromise between signaling protocols that require the maintenance of per-flow state and those that are completely stateless. The signaling scheme scales gracefully in terms of the number of nodes and/or traffic flows in the MANET. The authors analyze the security properties of the protocol and present simulation results to demonstrate its resistance to DoS attacks.     

Service overlay networks: SLAs, QoS, and bandwidth provisioning

We advocate the notion of service overlay network (SON) as an effective means to address some of the issues, in particular, end-to-end quality of service (QoS), plaguing the current Internet, and to facilitate the creation and deployment of value-added Internet services such as VoIP, Video-on-Demand, and other emerging QoS-sensitive services. The SON purchases bandwidth with certain QoS guarantees from the individual network domains via bilateral service level agreement (SLA) to build a logical end-to-end service delivery infrastructure on top of the existing data transport networks. Via a service contract, users directly pay the SON for using the value-added services provided by the SON. In this paper, we study the bandwidth provisioning problem for a SON which buys bandwidth from the underlying network domains to provide end-to-end value-added QoS sensitive services such as VoIP and Video-on-Demand. A key problem in the SON deployment is the problem of bandwidth provisioning, which is critical to cost recovery in deploying and operating the value-added services over the SON. The paper is devoted to the study of this problem. We formulate the bandwidth provisioning problem mathematically, taking various factors such as SLA, service QoS, traffic demand distributions, and bandwidth costs. Analytical models and approximate solutions are developed for both static and dynamic bandwidth provisioning. Numerical studies are also performed to illustrate the properties of the proposed solutions and demonstrate the effect of traffic demand distributions and bandwidth costs on SON bandwidth provisioning.     

Monitoring and controlling QoS network domains

Increased performance, fairness, and security remain important goals for service providers. In this work, we design an integrated distributed monitoring, traffic conditioning, and flow control system for higher performance and security of network domains. Edge routers monitor (using tomography techniques) a network domain to detect quality of service (QoS) violations—possibly caused by underprovisioning—as well as bandwidth theft attacks. To bound the monitoring overhead, a router only verifies service level agreement (SLA) parameters such as delay, loss, and throughput when anomalies are detected. The marking component of the edge router uses TCP flow characteristics to protect ‘fragile’ flows. Edge routers may also regulate unresponsive flows, and may propagate congestion information to upstream domains. Simulation results indicate that this design increases application‐level throughput of data applications such as large FTP transfers; achieves low packet delays and response times for Telnet and WWW traffic; and detects bandwidth theft attacks and service violations. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Bandwidth borrowing‐based QoS approach for adaptive call admission control in multiclass traffic wireless cellular networks

This paper proposes a QoS approach for an adaptive call admission control (CAC) scheme for multiclass service wireless cellular networks. The QoS of the proposed CAC scheme is achieved through call bandwidth borrowing and call preemption techniques according to the priorities of the traffic classes, using complete sharing of the available bandwidth. The CAC scheme maintains QoS in each class to avoid performance deterioration through mechanisms for call bandwidth degradation, and call bandwidth upgrading based on min–max and max–min policies for fair resource deallocation and reallocation, respectively. The proposed adaptive CAC scheme utilizes a measurement‐based online monitoring approach of the system performance, and a prediction model to determine the amount of bandwidth to be borrowed from calls, or the amount of bandwidth to be returned to calls. The simulation‐based performance evaluation of the proposed adaptive CAC scheme shows the strength and effectiveness of our proposed scheme. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

基于FPGA的流量负载均衡系统设计

介绍一种FPGA实现的流量负载均衡系统设计。该系统用于一路oc-192速率数据到四路oc-48速率数据的高速数据交换。设计基于区分服务,对有服务质量协议的数据固定队列交换，保证其QoS，并采用随机早期丢弃算法．提高对付网络拥塞的能力对无服务质量协议的数据采用灵活的最短队列交换，充分利用带宽。文中提出系统结构，给出存储单元管理方案,并且分析了结构的合理性，最后给出设计的硬件仿真结果。