Scalable Performance Signalling and Congestion Avoidance / Edition 1

by Michael Welzl

Overview

This book answers a question which came about while the author was work­ ing on his diploma thesis [1]: would it be better to ask for the available bandwidth instead of probing the network (like TCP does)? The diploma thesis was concerned with long-distance musical interaction ("NetMusic"). This is a very peculiar application: only a small amount of bandwidth may be necessary, but timely delivery and reduced loss are very important. Back then, these requirements led to a thorough investigation of existing telecommunication network mechanisms, but a satisfactory answer to the question could not be found. Simply put, the answer is "yes" - this work describes a mechanism which indeed enables an application to "ask for the available bandwidth". This obvi­ ously does not only concern online musical collaboration any longer. Among others, the mechanism yields the following advantages over existing alterna­ tives: • good throughput while maintaining close to zero loss and a small bottleneck queue length • usefulness for streaming media applications due to a very smooth rate • feasibility for satellite and wireless links • high scalability Additionally, a reusable framework for future applications that need to "ask the network" for certain performance data was developed.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781402075704
Publisher:	Springer US
Publication date:	09/30/2003
Edition description:	2003
Pages:	167
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.25(h) x 0.02(d)

Table of Contents

1. Introduction.- 1.1 Reader’s Guide.- 1.2 Work done.- 2. Related Work.- 2.1 Congestion Control in Packet Networks.- 2.2 Problems and Issues.- 2.3 A Trend towards Explicit Signalling.- 2.4 Congestion Control in ATM: ABR.- 2.5 Quality of Service.- 2.6 QoS and Congestion Control.- 2.7 TCP-friendly QoS: A Comparative Evaluation.- 2.8 Explicit Traffic Signalling in Packet Networks.- 3. PTP: A Framework for Explicit Performance Signalling.- 3.1 End-to-end Arguments revisited.- 3.2 Architecture.- 3.3 Performance Parameters.- 3.4 Policy Considerations.- 3.5 The Performance Transparency Prool.- 3.6 Content Type Definitions.- 3.7 Usage Scenarios.- 3.8 Realisation.- 4. Congestion Avoidance with Distributed Proportional Control.- 4.1 Architecture.- 4.2 Design Phase 1: Fluid Model.- 4.3 Analysis.- 4.4 Design Phase 2: Discrete Model.- 4.5 Evaluation 1: Dynamic Behaviour.- 4.6 Evaluation 2: Long-term Performance.- 4.7 Final Comments.- 5. Conclusion.- 5.1 Future Work.- Appendices.- A The ns Network Simulator.- A.1 Overview.- References.- About the Author.