Multiple Time Scale Congestion Control for Self-Similar Network Traffic
Analytical and empirical studies have shown that self-similar traffic can have a detrimental impact on network performance including amplified queuing delay and packet loss rate. Given the ubiquity of scale-invariant burstiness observed across diverse networking contexts, finding effective traffic control algorithms capable of detecting and managing self-similar traffic has become an important problem. In this paper, we study congestion control algorithms for improving network performance — in particular, throughput — under self-similar traffic conditions. Although scale-invariant burstiness implies the existence of concentrated periods of contention and idleness, the long-range dependence associated with self-similar traffic leaves open the possibility that correlation structure at larger time scales may be exploited for performance enhancement purposes. We construct a 2-level multiple time scale congestion control protocol that exercises congestion control concurrently across two time scales an order of magnitude apart. The first component — acting at the smaller time scale — is a generic linear increase/exponential decrease feedback congestion control that uses implicit prediction afforded by feedback to affect rate control sensitive to changes in network state at 20–200 ms time scales. The second component — acting at 2–5 s time scales — uses explicit prediction to detect persistent shifts in overall network contention and uses this information to modulate the aggressiveness exhibited by the first component. We show that cooperative interaction between the two congestion control modules acting on information at different time scales leads to improved performance vis-a-vis the case when the large time scale component is absent. We show that the improvement factor increases with long-range dependence and we show that as the number of flows engaging in multiple time scale congestion control (MTSC) increases, both fairness and efficiency are preserved.

title: A distributed protocol for multi-class QoS provision in noncooperative many-switch systems
abstract: This paper presents an architecture for multi-class quality of service (QoS) provision in wide area networks. Users or applications are assumed to be selfish and end-to-end QoS is determined by the service levels received by an application traffic flow at each router or switch along a path. In previous work, we have given a comprehensive analysis of the noncooperative multi-class QoS provision game for single-switch systems showing when Nash equilibria exist and under what conditions they are Pareto and/or system optimal. In this paper, we propose a specific network architecture for facilitating noncooperative and of provision in many-switch systems such as the Internet with emphasis on realizability. We shield the user from having to choose the service classes on the switches along a route-a hard combinatorial optimization problem even assuming perfect knowledge about network state-while preserving the basic premise of selfishness. This is achieved by employing a set of QoS agents installed at routers which act on behalf of an user's traffic flow. The QoS agent intercepts packets entering a switch implementing generalized processor sharing (GPS) packet scheduling-and using only constant space packet header overhead and zero per-connection state at the routers-determines which service class to assign the packet to to satisfy the user's end-to-end QoS requirement at minimum cost. We present simulation results which show that our architecture is able to provide stable, stratified services to application traffic with diverse QoS requirements.

title: Efficient Shaping of User-Specified QoS Using Aggregate-Flow Control
abstract: Architecting networks capable of providing scalable, efficient, and fair services to users with diverse QoS requirements is a pressing problem. The two principal issues are: design of "good" per-hop behavior and edge control. In previous work [2,3], we studied aggregate-flow QoS control from a noncooperative resource provisioning context. In [20], the framework was generalized by, one, solving an optimal aggregate-flow per-hop behavior problem, and two, showing how it can be used coupled with end-to-end label control to facilitate scalable and fair QoS when driven by selfish users and service providers. In this paper, we focus on optimal aggregate-flow per-hop control and complement analysis by experimental performance evaluation. We show that user-specified, diverse QoS is efficiently facilitated over the optimal per-hop behavior network substrate using adaptive label control end-to-end.

title: An architecture for noncooperative QoS provision in many-switch systems
abstract: With the proliferation of high-speed networks and networked services, provisioning differentiated services to a diverse user base with heterogeneous QoS requirements has become an important problem. The traditional approach of resource reservation and admission control provides both guarantees and graded services, however, at the cost of potentially underutilized resources and limited scalability. We describe a WAN QoS provision architecture that adaptively organizes best-effort bandwidth into stratified services with graded QoS properties such that the QoS needs of a diverse user base can be effectively met. This architecture-SBS (stratified best-effort service)-promotes a simple user/simple network realization where neither the user nor the network is burdened with complex computational responsibilities. SBS is scalable, efficient, and adaptive, and it complements the guaranteed service architecture, sharing a common network substrate comprised of GPS routers. It is also a functional complement, provisioning QoS efficiently commensurate with user needs, albeit at the cost of weaker protection. SBS is suited to noncooperative network environments where users behave selfishly and resource contention resolution is mediated by the principle of competitive interaction. A principal feature of SBS is the transformation of user-centric QoS provision mechanisms-a defining characteristic of competitive interaction entailing intimate user control of internal network resources-into network-centric mechanisms while preserving the former's resource allocation paradigm. End-to-end QoS control is facilitated by decentralized control based on Lagrangian optimization-achieve a target end-to-end QoS at minimum cost or resource usage-which, in turn, is amenable to distributed implementation. SBS achieves per-flow QoS control with zero per-flow state at routers and a packet header whose size is independent of hop count. SBS, in spite of foregoing both resource reservation and admission control, is able to provision stable, graded QoS.

title: On the performance characteristics of WLANs: revisited
abstract: Wide-spread deployment of infrastructure WLANs has made Wi-Fi an integral part of today's Internet access technology. Despite its crucial role in affecting end-to-end performance, past research has focused on MAC protocol enhancement, analysis and simulation-based performance evaluation without sufficient consideration for modeling inaccuracies stemming from inter-layer dependencies, including physical layer diversity, that significantly impact performance. We take a fresh look at IEEE 802.11 WLANs, and using a combination of experiment, simulation, and analysis demonstrate its surprisingly agile performance traits. Our main findings are two-fold. First, contention-based MAC throughput degrades gracefully under congested conditions, enabled by physical layer channel diversity that reduces the effective level of MAC contention. In contrast, fairness and jitter significantly degrade at a critical offered load. This duality obviates the need for link layer flow control for throughput improvement but necessitates traffic control for fairness and QoS. Second, TCP-over-WLAN achieves high throughput commensurate with that of wireline TCP under saturated conditions, challenging the widely held perception that TCP throughput fares poorly over WLANs when subject to heavy contention. We show that TCP-over-WLAN prowess is facilitated by the self-regulating actions of DCF and TCP congestion control that jointly drive the shared physical channel at an effective load of 2--3 wireless stations, even when the number of active stations is very large. Our results highlight subtle inter-layer dependencies including the mitigating influence of TCP-over-WLAN on dynamic rate shifting.

title: Performance evaluation of optimal aggregate-flow scheduling: a simulation study
abstract: Providing scalable QoS-sensitive services to applications with varying degrees of elasticity using aggregate-flow scheduling is a challenging problem. In a previous paper , we advanced a theoretical framework where an optimal differentiated services provisioning problem is formulated and solved to yield solutions for optimal per-hop control. In this paper, we extend our previous work by investigating performance evaluation and implementation issues associated with the induced optimal differentiated services architecture. We design a system that realizes the optimal per-hop control coupled with end-to-end adaptive QoS control, and implement a practical enhancement by introducing a scaling function which is applied to the TOS field label value in the IP header at each router. The scaling function allows the service provider to configure the per-hop control so as to export customized QoS separation-essential when shaping end-to-end absolute QoS over per-hop relative QoS-commensurate with the QoS profiles of the service provider's user base. We use simulation to study the structural and dynamical properties of differentiated services as affected by optimal aggregate-flow per-hop control.

title: A Comparative Study of Genetic Search
abstract: We present a comparative study of genetic algorithms and their search properties when treated as a combinatorial optimization technique. This is done in the context of the NP-hard problem MAX-SAT, the comparison being relative to the Metropolis process, and by extension, simulated annealing. Our contribution is twofold. First, we show that for large and diicult MAX-SAT instances, the contribution of cross-over to the search process is marginal. Little is lost if it is dispensed altogether, running mutation and selection as an enlarged Metropolis process. Second, we show that for these problem instances , genetic search consistently performs worse than simulated annealing when subject to similar resource bounds. The correspondence between the two algorithms is made more precise via a decomposition argument, and provides a framework for interpreting our results.

title: Stochastic analysis of packet-pair probing for network bandwidth estimation
abstract: In this paper, we perform a stochastic analysis of the packet-pair technique, which is a widely used method for estimating the network bandwidth in an end-to-end manner. There has been no explicit delay model of the packet-pair technique primarily because the stochastic behavior of a packet pair has not been fully understood. Our analysis is based on a novel insight that the transient analysis of the G/D/1 system can accurately describe the behavior of a packet pair, providing an explicit stochastic model. We first investigate a single-hop case and derive an analytical relationship between the input and the output probing gaps of a packet pair. Using this single-hop model, we provide a multi-hop model under an assumption of a single tight link. Our model shows the following two important features of the packet-pair technique: (i) The difference between the proposed model and the previous fluid model becomes significant when the input probing gap is around the characteristic value.  We give a discussion on recent packet-pair models in relation to the proposed model and show that most of them can be regarded as special cases of the proposed model.

title: Analysis and design of the virtual rate control algorithm for stabilizing queues in TCP networks
abstract: The virtual rate control (VRC) algorithm has been proposed for active queue management (AQM) in TCP networks. VRC, a rate-based control mechanism, responds quickly to traffic changes, thus allowing for high utilization and small loss. It can effectively stabilize both the input rate and the queue length around their target levels. In this paper, we analyze the stability of the VRC algorithm based on a linearized TCP model with time delay and provide a design guideline for parameter setting to make the overall system stable. Finally, we confirm the validity of our analysis and the effectiveness of VRC compared to RED, PI, REM, and AVQ through extensive ns-2 simulations.

title: On the effectiveness of route-based packet filtering for distributed DoS attack prevention in power-law internets
abstract: Denial of service (DoS) attack on the Internet has become a pressing problem. In this paper, we describe and evaluate route-based distributed packet filtering (DPF), a novel approach to distributed DoS (DDoS) attack prevention. We show that DPF achieves proactiveness and scalability, and we show that there is an intimate relationship between the effectiveness of DPF at mitigating DDoS attack and power-law network topology.The salient features of this work are two-fold. First, we show that DPF is able to proactively filter out a significant fraction of spoofed packet flows and prevent attack packets from reaching their targets in the first place. The IP flows that cannot be proactively curtailed are extremely sparse so that their origin can be localized---i.e., IP traceback---to within a small, constant number of candidate sites. We show that the two proactive and reactive performance effects can be achieved by implementing route-based filtering on less than 20% of Internet autonomous system (AS) sites. Second, we show that the two complementary performance measures are dependent on the properties of the underlying AS graph. In particular, we show that the power-law structure of Internet AS topology leads to connectivity properties which are crucial in facilitating the observed performance effects.

title: A BEM Formulation for Transient Axisymmetric Thermoelastic Analysis Using Particular Integrals
abstract: A particular integral formulation is presented for the first time in a purely axisymmetric transient uncoupled thermoelastic analysis. The governing axisymmetric elastostatic equation is used as the complementary solution and the particular integrals for displacements and tractions are derived by integrating the three-dimensional formulation along the circumferential direction leading to elliptic integrals. The numerical results for three example problems are given and compared with their analytical solutions. Generally, the agreement among all of those results is satisfactory, if a few interior points are used to include the known values of temperature.