Managing traffic during oversaturated conditions is a current challenge for practitioners due to the lack of adequate tools that can handle such situations. Unlike under-saturated conditions, operation of traffic signal systems during congestion requires careful consideration and analysis of the underlying causes of the congestion before developing mitigation strategies. The objectives of this research are to provide a practical guidance for practitioners to identify oversaturated scenarios and to develop a multi-objective methodology for selecting and evaluating mitigation strategy/ or combinations of strategies based on a guiding principles. The research focused on traffic control strategies that can be implemented by traffic signal systems. The research did not considered strategies that deals with demand reduction or seek to influence departure time choice, or route choice. The proposed timing methodology starts by detecting network's critical routes as a necessary step to identify the traffic patterns and potential problematic scenarios. A wide array of control strategies are defined and categorized to address oversaturation problematic scenarios. A timing procedure was then developed using the principles of oversaturation timing in cycle selection, split allocation, offset design, demand overflow, and queue allocation in non-critical links. Three regimes of operation were defined and considered in oversaturation timing: (1) loading, (2) processing, and (3) recovery. The research also provides a closed-form formula for switching control plans during the oversaturation regimes. The selection of optimal control plan is formulated as linear integer programming problem. Microscopic simulation results of two arterial test cases revealed that traffic control strategies developed using the proposed framework led to tangible performance improvements when compared to signal control strategies designed for operations in under-saturated conditions. The generated control plans successfully manage to allocate queues in network links. / Ph. D.

Depuis quelques années le trafic de l'internet mobile ne cesse d'augmenter. Cette croissance soutenue est liée à plusieurs facteurs, parmi lesquels l'évolution des terminaux, la grande diversité des services et des applications disponibles et le déploiement des nouvelles technologies d'accès radio mobile (3G/4G). À cet égard, le standard 3GPP pour les réseaux LTE propose une architecture offrant une gestion fine de la QoS (par flux). Ce modèle, hérité des réseaux mobiles traditionnels orientés connexion, soulève des problèmes en termes de scalabilité, efficacité et performances. Les travaux entrepris dans cette thèse ont pour objectif principal de proposer des solutions plus simples et moins coûteuses pour la gestion de la QoS dans les réseaux mobiles. À cette fin, à l'issue d'une étude et de l'évaluation de l'impact de la signalisation associée au modèle de QoS standard, deux modèles alternatifs ont été proposés. Nous proposons tout d'abord un modèle basée sur les mécanismes IP inspiré de l'approche DiffServ (par agrégat) largement étudié dans les réseaux IP fixes. Ce modèle fournit une gestion de la QoS simple, efficiente et rentable, tout en garantissant des performances équivalentes au modèle standard. Cependant, elle nécessite une remise à niveau de tous les eNB, et donc une longue phase de transition. En conséquence, nous proposons SloMo qui vise à améliorer l'expérience des clients mobiles, mais avec un objectif de déploiement plus rapide. SloMo est une solution de gestion implicite de la QoS depuis un point unique situé sur le chemin des communications. SloMo exploite la dynamique instaurée par le mécanisme de contrôle de flux de TCP. Il vise à recréer un goulot d'étranglement dynamique dans un équipement contrôlé par l'opérateur lorsque les points de congestion réels ne sont pas accessibles. Une fois ce goulot d'étranglement déporté, il est alors aisé d'effectuer une gestion de la qualité IP classique dans l'équipement supportant Slo-Mo. / The mobile data landscape is changing rapidly and mobile operators are today facing the daunting challenge of providing cheap and valuable services to ever more demanding customers. As a consequence, cost reduction is actively sought by operators as well as Quality of Service (QoS) preservation. Current 3GPP standards for LTE/EPC networks offer a fine tuning QoS (per-flow level), which inherits many characteristics of legacy telco networks. In spite of its good performance, such a QoS model reveals costly and cumbersome and finally, it remains very rarely deployed, thereby giving way to basic best-effort hegemony. This thesis aims at improving QoS in mobile networks through cost-effective solutions; To this end, after an evaluation of the impact and cost of signaling associated with the standard QoS model, alternative schemes are proposed, such as the IP-centric QoS model (per aggregate) inspired from the DiffServ approach widely used in fixed IP networks. This model provides a simple, efficient and cost-effective IP level QoS management with a performance level similar to standardized solutions. However, as it requires enhancements in the eNB, this scheme cannot be expected in mobile networks before a rather long time.Thus, we introduce Slo-Mo, which is a lightweight implicit mechanism for managing QoS from a distant point when the congestion point (e.g. eNB) is not able to do it. Slo-Mo creates a self-adaptive bottleneck which adjusts dynamically to the available resources taking advantage of TCP native flow control. Straightforward QoS management at IP level is then performed in the Slo-Mo node, leading to enhanced customer experience at a marginal cost and short term.

Traditionally the Internet is used for the following applications: FTP, e-mail and Web traffic. However in the recent years the Internet is increasingly supporting emerging applications such as IP telephony, video conferencing and online games. These new applications have different requirements in terms of throughput and delay than traditional applications. For example, interactive multimedia applications, unlike traditional applications, have more strict delay constraints and less strict loss constraints. Unfortunately, the current Internet offers only a best-effort service to all applications without any consideration to the applications specific requirements. In this thesis three existing Active Queue Management (AQM) mechanisms are modified by incorporating into these a control function to condition routers for better Quality of Service (QoS). Specifically, delay is considered as the key QoS metric as it is the most important metric for real-time multimedia applications. The first modified mechanism is Drop Tail (DT), which is a simple mechanism in comparison with most AQM schemes. A dynamic threshold has been added to DT in order to maintain packet queueing delay at a specified value. The modified mechanism is referred to as Adaptive Drop Tail (ADT). The second mechanism considered is Early Random Drop (ERD) and, iii in a similar way to ADT, a dynamic threshold has been used to keep the delay at a required value, the main difference being that packets are now dropped probabilistically before the queue reaches full capacity. This mechanism is referred to as Adaptive Early Random Drop (AERD). The final mechanism considered is motivated by the well known Random Early Detection AQM mechanism and is effectively a multi-threshold version of AERD in which packets are dropped with a linear function between the two thresholds and the second threshold is moveable in order to change the slope of the dropping function. This mechanism is called Multi Threshold Adaptive Early Random Drop (MTAERD) and is used in a similar way to the other mechanisms to maintain delay around a specified level. The main focus with all the mechanisms is on queueing delay, which is a significant component of end-to-end delay, and also on reducing the jitter (delay variation) A control algorithm is developed using an analytical model that specifies the delay as a function of the queue threshold position and this function has been used in a simulation to adjust the threshold to an effective value to maintain the delay around a specified value as the packet arrival rate changes over time. iv A two state Markov Modulated Poisson Process is used as the arrival process to each of the three systems to introduce burstiness and correlation of the packet inter-arrival times and to present sudden changes in the arrival process as might be encountered when TCP is used as the transport protocol and step changes the size of its congestion window. In the investigations it is assumed the traffic source is a mixture of TCP and UDP traffic and that the mechanisms conserved apply to the TCP based data. It is also assumed that this consists of the majority proportion of the total traffic so that the control mechanisms have a significant effect on controlling the overall delay. The three mechanisms are evaluated using a Java framework and results are presented showing the amount of improvement in QoS that can be achieved by the mechanisms over their non-adaptive counterparts. The mechanisms are also compared with each other and conclusions drawn.

Cette thèse s'inscrit dans une thématique pluridisciplinaire explorant les liens existants entre la théorie de la commande et les réseaux informatiques. L'idée consiste à appliquer les outils de l'Automatique pour la stabilisation du trafic dans les réseaux de communication. Premièrement, nous nous sommes intéressés à l'analyse de stabilité des systèmes à retards variables au travers de deux approches temporelles. D'une part, nous avons considéré la méthode de Lyapunov-Krasovskii dans laquelle nous avons élaboré des fonctionnelles en adéquation avec de nouvelles modélisations du système (segmentation du retard, dérivée temporelle). D'autre part, la stabilité a également été abordée avec une approche entrée-sortie, empruntant alors les outils de l'analyse robuste. Le système à retard est alors réécrit comme l'interconnexion d'une application linéaire avec une matrice constituée d'opérateurs définissant le système original. Après avoir revisité le principe de séparation quadratique, nous développons des opérateurs auxiliaires afin de caractériser au mieux la dynamique retardée et proposer des critères moins pessimistes. Deuxièmement, la méthodologie développée est ensuite utilisée pour le problème de contrôle de congestion d'un routeur lors de communications TCP. Ce protocole de bout en bout est sensible à la perte de paquet et modifie en conséquence son taux d'émission selon l'algorithme du AIMD. Il s'agit alors de commander le taux de perte par l'intermédiaire d'un mécanisme d'Active Queue Management situé au niveau du routeur afin de réguler le trafic. Les résultats théoriques sont ensuite évalués à l'aide du simulateur de réseaux NS-2.

Thesis(M.S.)--Auburn University, 2006. / Abstract. Vita. Includes bibliographic references (p.44-45).

Att vänta i kö är något som de flesta människor inte tycker om, speciellt långa köer där väntan drar ut på tiden. I ett försök att minska väntetiden för kunder har företag börjat utveckla nya typer av köhanteringssystem vilka stödjer smartphonebaserade nummerlappar. Företagen erbjuder smartphonebaserade nummerlappar på olika sätt; antigen via sms eller en mobilapp. De smartphonebaserade nummerlapparna ger användarna, i tillägg till den vanliga funktionalitet som traditionella köhanteringssystem har, möjlighet att bland annat få uppdateringar om kön, ansluta sig till en kö utan att fysiskt vara på plats och att informera systemet om att de lämnar kön.Syftet med studien var att undersöka om smartphonebaserade nummerlappar påverkar kundernas kundnöjdhet jämfört med traditionella system. Det ansågs finnas ett behov av att undersöka detta eftersom köhanteringssystem som stödjer smartphonebaserade nummerlappar är relativt nya och att det inte har påträffats någon forskning som undersöker de mobila nummerlapparnas påverkan på kundnöjdheten. Den fråga som ställdes var: Påverkar en smartphonebaserad nummerlappsapp kundens kundnöjdhet i förhållande till ett traditionellt system?Studien använde en experimentell strategi för att besvara frågeställningen. Ett fältexperiment genomfördes i studentexpeditionen vid Högskolan i Borås där besökarna fick välja en mobilnummerlappsapp eller en pappersnummerlapp. Efter att besökarens betjäntas i kassan erbjöds denne att besvara en enkät om kundnöjdhet. Resultaten från enkäten användes för att beräkna en kundnöjdhetspoäng för respektive respondent och för att jämföra svaren från grupperna med olika nummerlappstyper. Även gruppernas medelkundnöjdhetspoäng beräknades och jämfördes med hjälp av independent samples t-test.Resultaten i studien visade att appanvändarna var signifikant mer nöjda än pappersanvändarna i den totala jämförelsen. För de enskilda frågorna visade resultatet att kundnöjdheten i vissa fall påverkades positiv men även att kundnöjdheten i vissa fall inte påverkades alls. Slutsatsen som drogs var att en smartphonebaserade nummerlappsapp påverkar kundnöjdheten positivt i förhållande till traditionella system. / Waiting in lines is something that most people do not like, especially waiting in long queues where the waiting drags on. In an attempt to reduce the waiting time for customers companies have begun to develop new types of queue management systems which support smartphone based queue tickets. The companies offer the smartphone based queue tickets in different ways, either by SMS or a mobile application. In addition to the usual functionality that traditional queue management systems offers the smartphone-based queue tickets provide users, with the ability to receive updates about the queue, connect to a queue without being physically on the site and inform the system that they left the queue.The purpose of this study was to investigate if smartphone based queue tickets affect the customer satisfaction compared to traditional systems. There was a need for such an investigation because the queue management system that support smartphone based queue tickets are relatively new and no research which examines the affect that smartphone based queue tickets has on customer satisfaction could be found. The question asked was: Does a smartphone based queue ticket application affect the customer satisfaction of the customer compared to a traditional system?The study used an experimental approach to answer the question. A field experiment was conducted in the student office at the University in Borås were the visitors could choose either a mobile application or a paper queue ticket. When the visitors’ had been served they were asked to answer a questionnaire about customer satisfaction. The results from the survey were used to calculate a customer satisfaction scores for each respondent and to compare the responses of the groups with different queue ticket types. The mean of the customer satisfaction scores of each group were also calculated and compared using independent samples t-test.The results of the study showed that the users of mobile application queue tickets were significantly more satisfied than those who used paper queue tickets. The results of the individual questions showed that for some questions the customer satisfaction were positively affected but for other questions the customer satisfaction were not affected. The overall conclusion was that a smartphone based queue ticket application affects the customer satisfaction positively compared to a traditional queue management system.

The Internet has been more and more intensively used in recent years. Although network infrastructure has been regularly upgraded, and the ability to manage heavy traffic greatly increased, especially on the core networks, congestion never ceases to appear, as the amount of traffic that flow on the Internet seems to be increasing at an even faster rate. Thus, congestion control mechanisms play a vital role in the functioning of the Internet. Active Queue Management (AQM) is a popular type of congestion control mechanism that is implemented on gateways (most notably routers), which can predict and avoid the congestion before it happens. When properly configured, AQMs can effectively reduce the congestion, and alleviate some of the problems such as global synchronisation and unfairness to bursty traffic. However, there are still many problems regarding AQMs. Most of the AQM schemes are quite sensitive to their parameters setting, and these parameters may be heavily dependent on the network traffic profile, which the administrator may not have intensive knowledge of, and is likely to change over time. When poorly configured, many AQMs perform no better than the basic drop-tail queue. There is currently no effective method to compare the performance of these AQM algorithms, caused by the parameter configuration problem. In this research, the aim is to propose a new analytical model, which mainly uses discrete-time queueing theory. A novel transient modification to the conventional equilibrium-based method is proposed, and it is utilised to further develop a dynamic interactive model of responsive traffic and bottleneck queues. Using step-by-step analysis, it represents the bursty traffic and oscillating queue length behaviour in practical network more accurately. It also provides an effective way of predicting the behaviour of a TCP-AQM system, allowing easier parameter optimisation for AQM schemes. Numerical solution using MATLAB and software simulation using NS-2 are used to extensively validate the proposed models, theories and conclusions.

Traditionally the Internet is used for the following applications: FTP, e-mail and Web traffic. However in the recent years the Internet is increasingly supporting emerging applications such as IP telephony, video conferencing and online games. These new applications have different requirements in terms of throughput and delay than traditional applications. For example, interactive multimedia applications, unlike traditional applications, have more strict delay constraints and less strict loss constraints. Unfortunately, the current Internet offers only a best-effort service to all applications without any consideration to the applications specific requirements. In this thesis three existing Active Queue Management (AQM) mechanisms are modified by incorporating into these a control function to condition routers for better Quality of Service (QoS). Specifically, delay is considered as the key QoS metric as it is the most important metric for real-time multimedia applications. The first modified mechanism is Drop Tail (DT), which is a simple mechanism in comparison with most AQM schemes. A dynamic threshold has been added to DT in order to maintain packet queueing delay at a specified value. The modified mechanism is referred to as Adaptive Drop Tail (ADT). The second mechanism considered is Early Random Drop (ERD) and, iii in a similar way to ADT, a dynamic threshold has been used to keep the delay at a required value, the main difference being that packets are now dropped probabilistically before the queue reaches full capacity. This mechanism is referred to as Adaptive Early Random Drop (AERD). The final mechanism considered is motivated by the well known Random Early Detection AQM mechanism and is effectively a multi-threshold version of AERD in which packets are dropped with a linear function between the two thresholds and the second threshold is moveable in order to change the slope of the dropping function. This mechanism is called Multi Threshold Adaptive Early Random Drop (MTAERD) and is used in a similar way to the other mechanisms to maintain delay around a specified level. The main focus with all the mechanisms is on queueing delay, which is a significant component of end-to-end delay, and also on reducing the jitter (delay variation) A control algorithm is developed using an analytical model that specifies the delay as a function of the queue threshold position and this function has been used in a simulation to adjust the threshold to an effective value to maintain the delay around a specified value as the packet arrival rate changes over time. iv A two state Markov Modulated Poisson Process is used as the arrival process to each of the three systems to introduce burstiness and correlation of the packet inter-arrival times and to present sudden changes in the arrival process as might be encountered when TCP is used as the transport protocol and step changes the size of its congestion window. In the investigations it is assumed the traffic source is a mixture of TCP and UDP traffic and that the mechanisms conserved apply to the TCP based data. It is also assumed that this consists of the majority proportion of the total traffic so that the control mechanisms have a significant effect on controlling the overall delay. The three mechanisms are evaluated using a Java framework and results are presented showing the amount of improvement in QoS that can be achieved by the mechanisms over their non-adaptive counterparts. The mechanisms are also compared with each other and conclusions drawn.

Active Queue Management (AQM) schemes are used for ensuring the Quality of Service (QoS) in telecommunication networks. However, they are sensitive to parameter settings and have weaknesses in detecting and controlling congestion under dynamically changing network situations. Another drawback for the AQM algorithms is that they have been applied only on the Markovian models which are considered as Short Range Dependent (SRD) traffic models. However, traffic measurements from communication networks have shown that network traffic can exhibit self-similar as well as Long Range Dependent (LRD) properties. Therefore, it is important to design new algorithms not only to control congestion but also to have the ability to predict the onset of congestion within a network. An aim of this research is to devise some new congestion control methods for communication networks that make use of various traffic characteristics, such as LRD, which has not previously been employed in congestion control methods currently used in the Internet. A queueing model with a number of ON/OFF sources has been used and this incorporates a novel congestion prediction algorithm for AQM. The simulation results have shown that applying the algorithm can provide better performance than an equivalent system without the prediction. Modifying the algorithm by the inclusion of a sliding window mechanism has been shown to further improve the performance in terms of controlling the total number of packets within the system and improving the throughput. Also considered is the important problem of maintaining QoS constraints, such as mean delay, which is crucially important in providing satisfactory transmission of real-time services over multi-service networks like the Internet and which were not originally designed for this purpose. An algorithm has been developed to provide a control strategy that operates on a buffer which incorporates a moveable threshold. The algorithm has been developed to control the mean delay by dynamically adjusting the threshold, which, in turn, controls the effective arrival rate by randomly dropping packets. This work has been carried out using a mixture of computer simulation and analytical modelling. The performance of the new methods that have.

Timeliness in delivering packets for delay-sensitive applications is an important QoS (Quality of Service) measure in many systems, notably those that need to provide real-time performance. In such systems, if delay-sensitive traffic is delivered to the destination beyond the deadline, then the packets will be rendered useless and dropped after received at the destination. Bandwidth that is already scarce and shared between network nodes is wasted in relaying these expired packets. This thesis proposes that a deterministic per-hop delay can be achieved by using a dynamic queue threshold concept to bound delay of each node. A deterministic per-hop delay is a key component in guaranteeing a deterministic end-to-end delay. The research aims to develop a generic approach that can constrain network delay of delay-sensitive traffic in a dynamic network. Two adaptive queue management schemes, namely, DTH (Dynamic THreshold) and ADTH (Adaptive DTH) are proposed to realize the claim. Both DTH and ADTH use the dynamic threshold concept to constrain queuing delay so that bounded average queuing delay can be achieved for the former and bounded maximum nodal delay can be achieved for the latter. DTH is an analytical approach, which uses queuing theory with superposition of N MMBP-2 (Markov Modulated Bernoulli Process) arrival processes to obtain a mapping relationship between average queuing delay and an appropriate queuing threshold, for queue management. While ADTH is an measurement-based algorithmic approach that can respond to the time-varying link quality and network dynamics in wireless ad hoc networks to constrain network delay. It manages a queue based on system performance measurements and feedback of error measured against a target delay requirement. Numerical analysis and Matlab simulation have been carried out for DTH for the purposes of validation and performance analysis. While ADTH has been evaluated in NS-2 simulation and implemented in a multi-hop wireless ad hoc network testbed for performance analysis. Results show that DTH and ADTH can constrain network delay based on the specified delay requirements, with higher packet loss as a trade-off.