Resolving competition for resources between multimedia and traditional internet applications
Creators: name: Witosurapot, Suntorn
Publisher: name: Swinburne
Year: 2024

description: Although the Internet is the dominant broadband network, it still has a fundamental shortcoming in traffic management that does not properly support efficient use of resources together with differentiated quality of service for mixed traffic types. Even though a number of mechanisms have been proposed under key approaches of resource adaptation, resource reservation, and resource pricing, this problem remains unsolved to date because of its complexity and the way it relates to so many considerations of engineering and economics, and the diverse range of services desired by users. Hence it is considered difficult to devise a perfect mechanism that can universally solve this problem. In this respect, this dissertation contributes to insights into potential combinations and trade-offs of key approaches above in some efficient manner for managing traffic and scarce resources in the Internet. The first part of this work considers the combination of relaxed resource reservation and resource pricing schemes for handling the unfair bandwidth distribution problem in soft-bandwidth guarantee services of the Differentiated Services (DiffServ) Internet. We show that this unfairness problem can be handled using a network-user cooperative approach that addresses both individual user satisfaction and global optimization. We propose to add a mechanism based on price-based feedback signaling to DiffServ-capable routers providing Assured Forwarding (AF) Service so that they can offer per-flow signaling. This still allows them to work at an aggregate traffic level, hence the scalability feature of the DiffServ network can be retained. Our proposed mechanism allows the network to offer reliable service assurances via a distributed optimization algorithm, without introducing special protocols or requiring routers to have access of individual user requirements. Moreover, it can provide incentives for users to cooperate so that optimum performance can be accomplished. This approach has broad applicability and is relevant to all types of assured service classes. The second part of this work considers the combination of a specific resource pricing scheme based on a distributed optimization algorithm and multimedia adaptation schemes. Such a capability has not been available because most utility functions of multimedia applications do not meet the concavity constraints required by optimization algorithm. We proposed to overcome this limitation by redefining user utility functions into equivalent discrete forms and using combinatorial (discrete) optimization so that interfacing the resource-pricing scheme can be done in a normal way. However, to obtain feasible solutions in a scalable manner, an agent is included into the scheme for solving the combinatorial (discrete) optimization on behalf of a small group of users. In return, all users belonging to this group can benefit from social welfare maximization of their utilities over a network resource constraint. The last part of this work considers the combination of relaxed resource reservation and resource pricing schemes to enable a proper charging scheme for adaptive applications in the DiffServ Internet. We provide an optimization formulation of the problems of revenue and social welfare maximization, applied at a service provider (SP) who gives access to the DiffServ Internet. In this scheme, resources are provisioned per QoS-oriented class in a long time scale (service level agreement (SLA) duration), then priced based on user demand in the short time scale. We also show that the proposed charging scheme can provide feedback and incentives for users to use the network resource optimally via the standard packet marking, hence eliminating the need for specific pricing protocol. All of the proposals in this work can be used together, solving these key problems as a coordinated whole, and all use readily available network mechanisms.