A self‐regulating TCP acknowledgment (ACK) pacing scheme

We describe in this paper a new TCP ACK pacing scheme that dynamically tunes its behavior to account for variations or changes in the network load. The scheme does not require the knowledge of when TCP is in the slow‐start or congestion avoidance phase to determine the proper ACK pacing rate. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

An adaptive load balancing scheme for web servers

This paper describes an overload control scheme for web servers which integrates admission control and load balancing. The admission control mechanism adaptively determines the client request acceptance rate to meet the web servers' performance requirements while the load balancing or client request distribution mechanism determines the fraction of requests to be assigned to each web server. The scheme requires no prior knowledge of the relative speeds of the web servers, nor the work required to process each incoming request. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Recovery from control plane failures in GMPLS‐controlled optical networks

The health status of the control plane and the data plane of a GMPLS‐controlled optical network is independent in the physically separated control network implementation. In most control plane designs, besides the topology information, the entities of the routing protocol only record the number of available wavelengths on each link. However, the status of each wavelength is maintained by the entities of the signalling protocol. Without recovery ability of the signalling protocol CR‐LDP, a failure in the control plane will result in the permanent loss of the status information of wavelengths. A mechanism to recover the status information of the wavelengths is proposed. A downstream node maintains a label information database (LID) about assignable (free) labels in each incoming link. A copy of LID is redundantly stored in the upstream node as a label information mirror (LIM). A systematic procedure is proposed to synchronize the contents of a LIM and the corresponding LID. The initialization of a new LDP session with the enhanced recovery mechanism will guarantee the revival of the status information of wavelengths. It can recover multiple control channel failures, but it only applies to single node failure among any pair of adjacent nodes. © Crown copyright 2002. Reproduced with the permission of Her Majesty's Stationery Office. Published by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Weighted proportional loss rate differentiation of TCP traffic

Relative service differentiation refers to service models that provide assurances for the relative quality ordering between classes, rather than for the absolute service level in each class. An example is the proportional differentiation model which provides a way to control the quality spacing between classes locally at each hop. In this model, certain forwarding metrics are ratioed proportional to the class differentiation parameters that the network operator chooses. In this paper, we propose a new proportional loss rate differentiation mechanism that integrates relative loss rate differentiation directly into active queue management using random early detection. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley &Sons, Ltd.     

Weighted proportional window control of TCP traffic

This article describes a technique for weighted proportional window control of elastic traffic such as that generated by TCP. This is achieved through the modification of the receiver's advertised window of TCP connections sharing the bottleneck link while taking into account the price that each user of a connection has paid for the service and the total number of active connections sharing the bottleneck link. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Design and stability analysis of a rate control algorithm using the Routh-Hurwitz stability criterion

Feedback delays arise in the control of a computer network-from the information transfer process itself and from the processing of control signals at the network nodes. Flow control of data sources in a computer network often results in a time-delayed control problem. Feedback delay reduces the stability of a system. In this paper we discuss how to use the Routh-Hurwitz stability criterion to design and analyze the stability of a flow control algorithm with feedback delay.     

Enhancing TCP performance with a load-adaptive RED mechanism

This paper describes a technique for enhancing the effectiveness of RED by dynamically changing the threshold settings as the number of connections (and system load) changes. Using this technique, routers and switches can effectively control packet losses and TCP timeouts while maintaining high link utilization. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

DRED: a random early detection algorithm for TCP/IP networks

It is now widely accepted that a RED [2] controlled queue certainly performs better than a drop‐tail queue. But an inherent weakness of RED is that its equilibrium queue length cannot be maintained at a preset value independent of the number of TCP active connections. In addition, RED's optimal parameter setting is largely correlated with the number of connections, the round‐trip time, the buffer space, etc. In light of these observations, we propose DRED, a novel algorithm which uses the basic ideas of feedback control to randomly discard packets with a load‐dependent probability when a buffer in a router gets congested. Over a wide range of load levels, DRED is able to stabilize a router queue occupancy at a level independent of the number of active TCP connections. The benefits of stabilized queues in a network are high resources utilization, predictable maximum delays, more certain buffer provisioning, and traffic‐load‐independent network performance in terms of traffic intensity and number of connections. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.