Delay Tolerant Networks (DTN) are high delay networks with intermittent connectivity. Transport protocols developed either for high bandwidth networks or low delay networks suffer significantly on these type of networks. We have studied the impact of various transport protocols and application level protocols on a specific type of DTN namely Message Ferry Networks. At present there is no specific transport protocol that adapts well to the characteristics of Message Ferry networks. We developed a protocol that is well suited for Message ferry networks. Our protocol ensures major characteristics of a reliable transport protocol like in order delivery and reliable transfer of data without compromising on the throughput. We simulated our protocol by modifying the TCP process model in Opnet and compared it with standard TCP. The simulation results show a drastic improvement over the standard TCP protocol.

Service providers within an enterprise network are often governed by Client Service Contracts (CSC) that specify, among other constraints, the rate at which a particular service instance may be accessed. The service can be accessed via multiple points (typically middleware appliances) in a proxy tier configuration. The CSC and thus the rate specified have to be collectively respected by all the middleware appliances. The appliances locally shape the service requests to respect the global contract. We investigate the case where the CSC limits the rate to a service to X requests with an enforcement/observation interval of T seconds across all the middleware appliances. In this thesis, we define and evaluate the performance of Credit-based Algorithm for Service Traffic Shaping (CASTS), a decentralized algorithm for service traffic shaping in middleware appliances, in both a simulation and a realistic production level enterprise network setting. We show that CASTS respects the CSC and improves the responsiveness of the system to the variations of the input rate and leads to larger service capacity when compared to the traditional static allocation approach.

Advance reservation of lightpaths in an optical network has become a popular concept of reserving network resources in support of Grid applications. In this thesis, we have evaluated and compared several algorithms for dynamic scheduling of lightpaths using a flexible advance reservation model. The main aim is to find the best scheduling policy that improves network utilization and minimizes blocking. The scheduling of lightpaths involve both routing and wavelength assignment. Our simulation results show that minimum cost adaptive routing where link costs are determined by the current and future usage of the link provides the minimum blocking. Moreover, searching for k alternate paths within the scheduling window significantly improves the performance. For wavelength assignment, we have used a scheme that reduces fragmentation by minimizing unused leading or trailing gaps. We have also analyzed approaches for failure recovery and lightpath re-optimization. Finally, an advance reservation scheme needs timely information regarding the status of the optical links. To this end, we have surveyed various monitoring tools and techniques and we have proposed a monitoring framework to support fast restoration.

The issue of insider threat is one that organizations have dealt with for many years. Insider threat research began in the early 80's, but has yet to provide satisfactory results despite the fact that insiders pose a greater threat to organizations than external attackers. One of the key issues relating to this problem is that the amount of collectable data is enormous and it is currently impossible to analyze all of it, for each insider, in a timely manner. The purpose of this research is to analyze a portion of this collectable data, process usage, and determine if this data is useful in identifying insiders. Identification of the person controlling the workstation is useful in environments where workstations are left unattended, even for a short amount of time. To do this, we developed an insider threat detection system based on the Naive Bayes method which examines process usage data and creates individual profiles for users. By comparing collected data to these profiles we are able to determine who is controlling the workstation with high accuracy. We are able to achieve true positive rates of 96\% while maintaining fewer than 0.5\% false positives.

The goal of this research is to estimate the capacity of wireless mesh networks (WMNs). WMNs have unique topology and traffic patterns when compared to conventional wireless Internet access networks. In WMNs, user nodes act as a host and a router simultaneously and form a meshed topology. Traffic is forwarded towards a gateway connected to the Internet by cooperating user nodes in a multihop fashion. Since the considered WMNs use IEEE 802.11 for medium access control and physical layer implementation, theoretical maximum throughput and fairness issues in IEEE 802.11 networks are investigated as a preliminary framework for the capacity estimation of WMN. Due to a centralized traffic pattern and meshed topology, forwarded traffic becomes heavier as it gets closer to the gateway. The characteristics of the traffic behavior in WMNs are thoroughly examined and an analytical solution for capacity estimation is presented. The analytical solution is derived for various topologies and validated using simulations.

This thesis studies the effect of non-negligible signaling delays on the performance of wavelength-assignment heuristics, wavelength reservation schemes, routing schemes, holding time (average being 1/μ) of the lightpaths and traffic loads (average being λ/μ), in second-generation optical wide area networks (WANs). A network simulator was developed using the C++ language for this study. The simulator supports any input topology with single or multi-fiber links, many routing schemes (static, alternate and dynamic), dynamic traffic loads, and may be modified easily to accomodate different wavelength-assignment policies. The signaling messages used, in our study, to establish lightpaths, follow the Constrained-Routing Label Distribution Protocol (CR-LDP) semantics. The problem studied here falls under the general category of Routing and Wavelength Assignment (RWA) Problem which has been proved to be NP-hard. Previous studies have mostly considered static routing (with static or dynamic traffic demand), and static traffic demand (with static or alternate routing) under zero propagation delays. A few papers in the recent past have studied the effect of signaling delays but have been limited in scope. We study the effect of varying holding times, compare random versus first-fit wavelength assignment policy, compare fixed versus alternate routing, compare backward wavelength reservation schemes to forward reservation schemes, and lastly study the effect of traffic loads. We find that, in general, the random wavelength assignment policy performs better than first-fit policy and that under certain conditions, alternate routing scheme performs worse than fixed routing scheme.

No description available.

The objectives of this thesis are to investigate the challenges on video streaming, to explore and compare different video streaming mechanisms, and to develop video streaming algorithms that maximize visual quality. To achieve these objectives, we first investigate scalable video multicasting schemes by comparing layered video multicasting with replicated stream video multicasting. Even though it has been generally accepted that layered video multicasting is superior to replicated stream multicasting, this assumption is not based on a systematic and quantitative comparison. We argue that there are indeed scenarios where replicated stream multicasting is the preferred approach. We also consider the problem of providing perceptually good quality of layered VBR video. This problem is challenging, because the dynamic behavior of the Internet's available bandwidth makes it difficult to provide good quality. Also a video encoded to provide a consistent quality exhibits significant data rate variability. We are, therefore, faced with the problem of accommodating the mismatch between the available bandwidth variability and the data rate variability of the encoded video. We propose an optimal quality adaptation algorithm that minimizes quality variation while at the same time increasing the utilization of the available bandwidth. Finally, we investigate the transmission control protocol (TCP) for a transport layer protocol in streaming packetized media data. Our approach is to model a video streaming system and derive relationships under which the system employing the TCP protocol achieves desired performance. Both simulation results and the Internet experimental results validate this model and demonstrate the buffering delay requirements achieve desired video quality with high accuracy. Based on the relationships, we also develop realtime estimation algorithms of playout buffer requirements.

Peer-to-peer streaming has emerged as a killer application in today's Internet, delivering a large variety of live multimedia content to millions of users at any given time with low server cost. Though successfully deployed, the efficiency and optimality of the current peer-to-peer streaming protocols are still less than satisfactory. In this thesis, we investigate optimizing solutions to enhance the performance of the state-of-the-art mesh-based peer-to-peer streaming systems, utilizing both theoretical performance modeling and extensive real-world measurements. First, we model peer-to-peer streaming applications in both the single-overlay and multi-overlay scenarios, based on the solid foundation of optimization and game theories. Using these models, we design efficient and fully decentralized solutions to achieve performance optimization in peer-to-peer streaming. Then, based on a large volume of live measurements from a commercial large-scale peer-to-peer streaming application, we extensively study the real-world performance of peer-to-peer streaming over a long period of time. Highlights of our measurement study include the topological characterization of large-scale streaming meshes, the statistical characterization of inter-peer bandwidth availability, and the investigation of server capacity utilization in peer-to-peer streaming. Utilizing in-depth insights from our measurements, we design practical algorithms that advance the performance of key protocols in peer-to-peer live streaming. We show that our optimizing solutions fulfill their design objectives in various realistic scenarios, using extensive simulations and experiments.

<p>The emergence of real-time applications, like Voice over IP and video conferencing, in IP networks implies a challenge to the underlying infrastructure. Several real-time applications have requirements on timeliness as well as on reliability and are accompanied by signaling applications to set up, tear down and control the media sessions. Since neither of the traditional transport protocols responsible for end-to-end transfer of messages was found suitable for signaling traffic, the Stream Control Transmission Protocol (SCTP) was standardized. The focus for the protocol was initially on telephony signaling applications, but it was later widened to serve as a general purpose transport protocol. One major new feature to enhance robustness in SCTP is multihoming, which enables for more than one path within the same association.</p><p>In this thesis we evaluate some of the mechanisms affecting transmission performance in case of a switchover between paths in a multihomed SCTP session. The major part of the evaluation concerns a failure situation, where the current path is broken. In case of failure, the endpoint does not get an explicit notification, but has to react upon missing acknowledgements. The challenge is to distinguish path failure from temporary congestion to decide  when to switch to an alternate path. A too fast switchover may be spurious, which could reduce transmission performance, while a too late switchover also results in reduced transmission performance. This implies a tradeoff which involves several protocol as well as network parameters and we elaborate among these to give a coherent view of the parameters and their interaction. Further, we present a recommendation on how to tune the parameters to meet  telephony signaling requirements, still without violating fairness to other traffic.</p><p>We also consider another angle of switchover performance, the startup on the alternate path. Since the available capacity is usually unknown to the sender, the transmission on a new path is started at a low rate and then increased as acknowledgements of successful transmissions return. In case of switchover in the middle of a media session the startup phase after a switchover could cause problems to the application. In multihomed SCTP the availability of the alternate path makes it feasible for the end-host to estimate the available capacity on the alternate path prior to the switchover. Thus, it would be possible to implement a more efficient startup scheme. In this thesis we combine different switchover scenarios with relevant traffic. For these combinations, we analytically evaluate and quantify the potential performance gain from utilizing an ideal startup mechanism as compared to the traditional startup procedure.</p>