Improving network performance in terms of efficiency, fairness in the bandwidth, and system stability has been a research issue for decades. Current Internet traffic control maintains sophistication in end TCPs but simplicity in routers. In each router, incoming packets queue up in a buffer for transmission until the buffer is full, and then the packets are dropped. This router queue management strategy is referred to as Drop Tail. End TCPs eventually detect packet losses and slow down their sending rates to ease congestion in the network. This way, the aggregate sending rate converges to the network capacity. In the past, Drop Tail has been adopted in most routers in the Internet due to its simplicity of implementation and practicability with light traffic loads. However Drop Tail, with heavy-loaded traffic, causes not only high loss rate and low network throughput, but also long packet delay and lengthy congestion conditions. To address these problems, active queue management (AQM) has been proposed with the idea of proactively and selectively dropping packets before an output buffer is full. The essence of AQM is to drop packets in such a way that the congestion avoidance strategy of TCP works most effectively. Significant efforts in developing AQM have been made since random early detection (RED), the first prominent AQM other than Drop Tail, was introduced in 1993. Although various AQMs also tend to improve fairness in bandwidth among flows, the vulnerability of short-lived flows persists due to the conservative nature of TCP. It has been revealed that short-lived flows take up traffic with a relatively small percentage of bytes but in a large number of flows. From the user’s point of view, there is an expectation of timely delivery of short-lived flows. Our approach is to apply artificial intelligence technologies, particularly fuzzy logic (FL), to address these two issues: an effective AQM scheme, and preferential treatment for short-lived flows. Inspired by the success of FL in the robust control of nonlinear complex systems, our hypothesis is that the Internet is one of the most complex systems and FL can be applied to it. First of all, state of the art AQM schemes outperform Drop Tail, but their performance is not consistent under different network scenarios. Research reveals that this inconsistency is due to the selection of congestion indicators. Most existing AQM schemes are reliant on queue length, input rate, and extreme events occurring in the routers, such as a full queue and an empty queue. This drawback might be overcome by introducing an indicator which takes account of not only input traffic but also queue occupancy for early congestion notification. The congestion indicator chosen in this research is traffic load factor. Traffic load factor is in fact dimensionless and thus independent of link capacity, and also it is easy to use in more complex networks where different traffic classes coexist. The traffic load indicator is a descriptive measure of the complex communication network, and is well suited for use in FL control theory. Based on the traffic load indicator, AQM using FL – or FLAQM – is explored and two FLAQM algorithms are proposed. Secondly, a mice and elephants (ME) strategy is proposed for addressing the problem of the vulnerability of short-lived flows. The idea behind ME is to treat short-lived flows preferably over bulk flows. ME’s operational location is chosen at user premise gateways, where surplus processing resources are available compared to other places. By giving absolute priority to short-lived flows, both short and long-lived flows can benefit. One problem with ME is starvation of elephants or long-lived flows. This issue is addressed by dynamically adjusting the threshold distinguishing between mice and elephants with the guarantee that minimum capacity is maintained for elephants. The method used to dynamically adjust the threshold is to apply FL. FLAQM is deployed to control the elephant queue with consideration of capacity usage of mice packets. In addition, flow states in a ME router are periodically updated to maintain the data storage. The application of the traffic load factor for early congestion notification and the ME strategy have been evaluated via extensive experimental simulations with a range of traffic load conditions. The results show that the proposed two FLAQM algorithms outperform some well-known AQM schemes in all the investigated network circumstances in terms of both user-centric measures and network-centric measures. The ME strategy, with the use of FLAQM to control long-lived flow queues, improves not only the performance of short-lived flows but also the overall performance of the network without disadvantaging long-lived flows.

<p>The objective of the thesis is primarily to conform and encode a digital signal to be controlled by software. The idea is to transport today’s tracesignal through the IP-network instead of cable-net. In this report I will suggest a possible solution to get a fully passed result with no peculiar time delay. I will also suggest some ideas for a future work with the new tracesystem.</p>

<p>This thesis presents research on transport layer behavior in wireless networks. As the Internet is expanding its reach to include mobile devices, it has become apparent that some of the original design assumptions for the dominant transport protocol, TCP, are approaching their limits. A key feature of TCP is the congestion control algorithm, constructed with the assumption that packet loss is normally very low, and that packet loss therefore is a sign of network congestion. This holds true for wired networks, but for mobile wireless networks non-congestion related packet loss may appear. The varying signal power inherent with mobility and handover between base-stations are two example causes of such packet loss. This thesis provides an overview of the challenges for TCP in wireless networks together with a compilation of a number of suggested TCP optimizations for these environments. A TCP modification called TCP-L is proposed. It allows an application to increase its performance, in environments where residual bit errors normally give a degraded throughput, by making a reliability tradeoff. The performance of TCP-L is experimentally evaluated with an implementation in the Linux kernel. The transport layer performance in a 4G scenario is also experimentally investigated, focusing on the impact of the link layer design and its parameterization. Further, for emulation-based protocol evaluations, controlled packet loss and bit error generation is shown to be an important aspect.</p>

Amateur Packet Radio Networking presently uses the NET/ROM protocol to establish the network. NET/ROM is considered to be insufficient to support the expected growth of the network. This research work proposes to use the TCP/IP protocol suite instead to build the network. A comparison between features of both protocols supports this proposal. A new and simple hardware platform is introduced. This will provide adequate support for initial experiments. Design considerations for both hardware architecture and software architecture are discussed in detail. Implementation of the IP protocol used for routing is discussed. / Graduation date: 1992

Les réseaux optiques ont connu une émergence importante dans le domaine des télécommunications, et ceci grâce à leur bande passante offerte. Actuellement, la technique la plus prometteuse est la commutation optique de rafales (OBS). D'une part, OBS permet une meilIeure exploitation de la bande passante, tout en ayant un degré de complexité inférieur à OPS (Optical Packet Switching), d'autre part, OBS offre une gestion des ressources beaucoup plus efficace, comparée à OCS (Optical Circuit Switching). Plusieurs études ont démontré que le mécanisme « load-balancing » permet d'équilibrer le trafic à travers les différents noeuds, réduisant ainsi la probabilité de congestion dans les réseaux OBS. Cependant, l'utilisation du « load-balancing » a mis en évidence d'autres problèmes, particulièrement au niveau de la couche TCP (Transmission Control Protocol). De là, « Source-ordering » a été proposé comme solution pour améliorer les performances de TCP, en effectuant l'ordonnancement des rafales au niveau des sources. Dans ce travail, nous nous proposons d'étudier et d'approfondir le mécanisme du « load-balancing » afin de maximiser le débit TCP. Notre défi consiste a trouver un concept permettant d'éviter la réception en désordre des segments IP, au niveau de la couche TCP, et par conséquent à réduire le nombre de FTOs (False Time Out) et de FFRs (False Fast Retransmit). Nous avons implémenté une nouvelle technique basée sur le mécanisme de résolution de contention proactive « load-balancing » qu'on a appelée « ordonnancement à la destination ». Les résultats obtenus montrent une amélioration importante du débit TCP lors de l'emploi du mécanisme d'ordonnancement à la destination. ______________________________________________________________________________ MOTS-CLÉS DE L’AUTEUR : Maximisation du débit TCP, OBS, TCP, Rafale, Résolution de contention, Mécanisme proactif, Chemins alternatifs, Equilibrage de charge.

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A proof of concept study into the working of network media capture and visualization through the use of Packet Capture in real-time. An application was developed that is able to capture tcp network packets; identify and display images in raw HTTP network traffic through the use of search, sort, error detection, timeout failsafe algorithms in real time. The application was designed for network administrators to visualize raw network media content together with its relevant network source \&amp; address identifiers. Different approaches were tried and tested such as using Perl with GTK+ and Visual Studio C\# .Net. Furthermore two different types of image identification methods were used: raw magic string identification in pure tcp network traffic and HTTP Mime type identification. The latter being more accurate and faster. C# was seen as vastly superior in both speed of prototyping and final performance evaluation. The study presents a novel new way of monitoring networks on the basis of their media content through deep packet inspection

The objective of the thesis is primarily to conform and encode a digital signal to be controlled by software. The idea is to transport today’s tracesignal through the IP-network instead of cable-net. In this report I will suggest a possible solution to get a fully passed result with no peculiar time delay. I will also suggest some ideas for a future work with the new tracesystem.

The explosive growth of the Internet during the last few years, has been propelled by the TCP/IP protocol suite and the best effort packet forwarding service. However, quality of service (QoS) is far from being a reality especially for multimedia services like video streaming and video conferencing. In the case of wireless and mobile networks, the problem becomes even worse due to the physics of the medium, resulting into further deterioration of the system performance. Goal of this dissertation is the systematic development of comprehensive models that jointly characterize the performance of transport protocols and media delivery in heterogeneous wireless networks. At the core of our novel methodology, is the use of analytical models for driving the design of media transport algorithms, so that the delivery of conversational and non-interactive multimedia data is enhanced in terms of throughput, delay, and jitter. More speciffically, we develop analytical models that characterize the throughput and goodput of the transmission control protocol (TCP) and the transmission friendly rate control (TFRC) protocol, when CBR and VBR multimedia workloads are considered. Subsequently, we enhance the transport protocol models with new parameters that capture the playback buffer performance and the expected video distortion at the receiver. In this way a complete end-to-end model for media streaming is obtained. This model is used as a basis for a new algorithm for rate-distortion optimized mode selection in video streaming appli- cations. As a next step, we extend the developed models for the aforementioned protocols, so that heterogeneous wireless networks can be accommodated. Subsequently, new algorithms are proposed in order to enhance the developed media streaming algorithms when heterogeneous wireless networks are also included. Finally, the aforementioned models and algorithms are extended for the case of concurrent multipath media transport over several hybrid wired/wireless links.

Interdomain traffic engineering (TE) controls the flow of traffic between autonomous systems (ASes) to achieve performance goals under various resource constraints. Interdomain TE can be categorized into ingress TE and egress TE, which aim to control the ingress and egress traffic flow in a network, respectively. Most interdomain TE techniques are based on BGP, which was not designed to support performance based routing. Hence even though some basic interdomain TE techniques are widely deployed, their overall effectiveness and impact on interdomain traffic are not well understood. Furthermore, systematic practices for deploying these techniques have yet to be developed. In this thesis, we explore these open issues for both ingress and egress TE. We first focus on the AS-Path prepending technique in interdomain ingress TE. We design a polynomial algorithm that takes network settings as input and produces the optimal prepending at each ingress link. We also develop methods to measure the inputs of the optimal algorithm by leveraging widely available looking glass severs and evaluate the errors of such measurement. We further propose an algorithm, based on this optimal algorithm, that is robust to input errors. We then focus on Intelligent Routing Control (IRC) systems often used at multihomed networks for egress interdomain TE. To address the possible traffic oscillation problem caused by multiple IRC systems, we design a class of randomized IRC algorithms. Through simulations, we show that the proposed algorithms can effectively mitigate oscillations. We also show that IRC systems using randomized path switching algorithms perform better than those switching path deterministically, when both types of IRC systems co-exist. To further understand the performance impact of IRC systems, we next focus on the performance of applications, such as TCP connections. We study the synergistic and antagonistic interactions between IRC and TCP connections, through a simple dual-feedback model. We first examine the impact of sudden RTT and available bandwidth changes in TCP connection. We then examine the effect of IRC measurement delays on closed loop traffic. We also show the conditions under which IRC is beneficial under various path impairment models.