Several studies have considered control theory tools for traffic control in communication networks, as for example the congestion control issue in IP (Internet Protocol) routers. In this paper, we propose to design a linear observer for time-delay systems to address the traffic monitoring issue in TCP/AQM (Transmission Control Protocol/Active Queue Management) networks. Due to several propagation delays and the queueing delay, the set TCP/AQM is modeled as a multiple delayed system of a particular form. Hence, appropriate robust control tools as quadratic separation are adopted to construct a delay dependent observer for TCP flows estimation. Note that, the developed mechanism enables also the anomaly detection issue for a class of DoS (Denial of Service) attacks. At last, simulations via the network simulator NS-2 and an emulation experiment validate the proposed methodology.
For the last few years, we assist to a growing interest of designing AQM (Active Queue Management) using control theory. In this paper, we focus on the synthesis of an AQM based on the Lyapunov theory for time delay systems. With the help of a recently developed Lyapunov-Krasovskii functional and using a state space representation of a linearized fluid model of TCP, two robust AQMs stabilizing the TCP model are constructed. Notice that our results are constructive and the synthesis problem is reduced to a convex optimization scheme expressed in terms of linear matrix inequalities (LMIs). Final…
The MGT fluid model has been used extensively to guide designs of AQM schemes aiming to alleviate adverse effects of Internet congestion. In this paper, we provide a new analysis of a TCP/AQM system that aims to improve the accuracy of the MGT fluid model especially in heavy traffic conditions. The analysis is based on the consideration of two extreme congestion scenarios that leads to the derivation of upper and lower bounds for the queue length and marking probability dynamics and showing that they approach each other in steady state. Both discrete and continuous time models are provided. Si…
The IETF's Prague L4S Requirements [DSBE20] expect an L4S congestion control to somehow detect if there is a classic ECN [RFB01] AQM at the bottleneck and fall back to Reno-friendly behaviour (as it would on a loss). This paper addresses that requirement in depth. A solution has been implemented in Linux and extensively tested, which distinguishes L4S from Classic AQMs primarily by their delay variation. This paper describes version 2 of the design of that solution, giving extensive rationale and pseudocode. It briefly summarizes a comprehensive testbed evaluation of the solution, referring to…
In recent years, Active Queue Management (AQM) mechanisms to improve the performance of TCP/IP networks have acquired a relevant role. In this paper we present a simple and robust RED-type algorithm together with a couple of dynamical variants with the ability to adapt to the specific characteristics of different network environments, as well as to the user needs. We first present a basic version called Beta RED (BetaRED), where the user is free to adjust the parameters according to the network conditions. The aim is to make the parameter setting easy and intuitive so that a good performance i…
This paper investigates the overload problem of a single congested router in TCP (Transmission Control Protocol) networks. To cope with the congestion phenomenon, we design a feedback control based on a multiple time-delays model of the set TCP/AQM (Active Queue Management). Indeed, using robust control tools, especially in the quadratic separation framework, the TCP/AQM model is rewritten as an intercon- nected system and a structured state feedback is constructed to stabilize the network variables. Finally, we illustrate the proposed methodology with a numerical example and simulations using…
This paper presents and analyses the implementation of a novel active queue management (AQM) named FavorQueue that aims to improve delay transfer of short lived TCP flows over best-effort networks. The idea is to dequeue packets that do not belong to a flow previously enqueued first. The rationale is to mitigate the delay induced by long-lived TCP flows over the pace of short TCP data requests and to prevent dropped packets at the beginning of a connection and during recovery period. Although the main target of this AQM is to accelerate short TCP traffic, we show that FavorQueue does not only …
Recent research has shown the link between congestion control in communication networks and feedback control system. In this paper, the design of an active queue management (AQM) which can be viewed as a controller, is considered. Based on a state space representation of a linearized fluid flow model of TCP, the AQM design is converted to a state feedback synthesis problem for time delay systems. Finally, an example extracted from the literature and simulations via a network simulator NS (under cross traffic conditions) support our study.
Addressing performance degradations in end-to-end congestion control has been one of the most active research areas in the last decade. Active queue management (AQM) aims to improve the overall network throughput, while providing lower delay and reduce packet loss and improving network. The basic idea is to actively trigger packet dropping (or marking provided by explicit congestion notification (ECN)) before buffer overflow. Radial bias function (RBF)-based AQM controller is proposed in this paper. RBF controller is suitable as an AQM scheme to control congestion in TCP communication networks…
Congestion control is essential for the stability of the Internet and the corresponding algorithms are commonly evaluated for interoperability based on flow-rate fairness. In contrast, video conferencing software such as Zoom uses custom congestion control algorithms whose fairness behavior is mostly unknown. Aggravatingly, video conferencing has recently seen a drastic increase in use - partly caused by the COVID-19 pandemic - and could hence negatively affect how available Internet resources are shared. In this paper, we thus investigate the flow-rate fairness of video conferencing congestio…
Most of the current active queue management (AQM) designs have major issues including severe hardship of being tuned for highly fluctuated cellular access link bandwidths. Consequently, most of the cellular network providers either give up using AQMs or use conservative offline configurations for them. However, these choices will significantly impact the performance of the emerging interactive and highly delay sensitive applications such as virtual reality and vehicle-to-vehicle communications. Therefore, in this paper, we investigate the problems of existing AQM schemes and show that they are…
We extend our earlier studies of buffer requirements of TCP over ABR in two directions. First, we study the performance of TCP over ABR in an ATM backbone. On the backbone, the TCP queues are at the edge router and not inside the ATM network. The router requires buffer equal to the sum of the receiver window sizes of the participating TCP connections. Second, we introduce various patterns of VBR background traffic. The VBR background introduces variance in the ABR capacity and the TCP traffic introduces variance in the ABR demand. Some simple switch schemes are unable to keep up with the combi…
In this paper we propose and implement novel techniques for performance evaluation of web traffic (response time, response code, etc.), with no reassembly of the underlying TCP connection, which severely restricts the traffic analysis throughput. Furthermore, our proposed software for HTTP traffic analysis runs in standard hardware, which is very cost-effective. Besides, we present sub-TCP connection load balancing techniques that significantly increase throughput at the expense of losing very few HTTP transactions. Such techniques provide performance evaluation statistics which are indistingu…
In the era of heavy-duty transmission control protocols (TCP), adapted for extremely hi-bandwidth datacenters, the fundamental question of stable interaction with either proposed active queue management(AQM) or popularly discussed Random Early Detection (RED) remains a hotly debated issue. While there are claims of "oscillation" only dynamical behavior, there are equally large number of claims which demonstrate the chaotic nature of different flavors of TCP and their AQM interaction. In this work, we provide a sound and analytical mathematical model of DTCP/D2TCP and study their interaction wi…
During the COVID-19 pandemic the Comcast network performed well in response to unprecedented changes in Internet usage and video communications applications that are sensitive to network latency have exploded in popularity. However, in today's typical networks-such as a home network-those applications often degrade if they are sharing a network link with other network traffic. This is a problem caused by a network design flaw often described using the term 'buffer bloat'. Several years ago, Comcast helped to fund research and development in the technical community into new Active Queue Managem…
Compressed video is well known to be self-similar in nature. We model VBR carrying Long-Range Dependent (LRD), multiplexed MPEG-2 video sources. The actual traffic for the model is generated using fast-fourier transform of generate the fractional gaussian noise (FGN) sequence. Our model of compressed video sources bears similarity to an MPEG-2 Transport Stream carrying video, i.e., it is long-range dependent and generates traffic in a piecewise-CBR fashion. We study the effect of such VBR traffic on ABR carrying TCP traffic. The effect of such VBR traffic is that the ABR capacity is highly var…
On the Internet, sub-millisecond queueing delay and capacity-seeking have traditionally been considered mutually exclusive. We introduce a service that offers both: Low Latency Low Loss Scalable throughput (L4S). When tested under a wide range of conditions emulated on a testbed using real residential broadband equipment, queue delay remained both low (median 100--300 $μ$s) and consistent (99th percentile below 2 ms even under highly dynamic workloads), without compromising other metrics (zero congestion loss and close to full utilization). L4S exploits the properties of `Scalable' congestion …
Only little is publicly known about traffic in non-educational data centers. Recent studies made some knowledge available, which gives us the opportunity to create more realistic traffic models for data center research. We used this knowledge to create the first publicly available traffic generator that produces realistic traffic between hosts in data centers of arbitrary size. We characterize traffic by using six probability distribution functions and concentrate on the generation of traffic on flow-level. The distribution functions are described as step functions, which makes our generator h…
To meet an increasing demand for multimedia services and electronic connectivity across the world, satellite networks will play an indispensable role in the deployment of global networks. The new services gaining momentum include mobile services, private intranets and high data rate internet access carried over integrated satellite-fiber networks. Several performance issues need to be addressed before a transport layer protocol, like TCP can satisfactorily work over satellite ATM for large delay-bandwidth networks. In this paper, we review the proposed satellite systems and discuss challenges …
Since current widely available network protocols/systems are mainly throughput-oriented designs, meeting stringent delay requirements of new applications such as virtual reality and vehicle-to-vehicle communications on cellular network requires new network protocol/system designs. C2TCP is an effort toward that new design direction. C2TCP is inspired by in-network active queue management (AQM) designs such as RED and CoDel and motivated by lack of a flexible end-to-end (e2e) approach which can adapt itself to different applications' QoS requirements without modifying any network devices. It co…
Active Queue Management(AQM) is an efficient tool in the network to avoid saturation of the queue by warning the sender that the queue is almost full to reduce its speed before the queue is full. The buffer management schemes focus on space management, in the other hand scheduling priorities (focusing on time management) attempt to guarantee acceptable delay boundaries to applications for which it is important that delay is bounded. Combined mechanisms (time and space management) are possible and enable networks to improve the perceived quality for multimedia traffic at the end users. The key …
Satellite networks play an indispensable role in providing global Internet access and electronic connectivity. To achieve such a global communications, provisioning of quality of service (QoS) within the advanced satellite systems is the main requirement. One of the key mechanisms of implementing the quality of service is traffic management. Traffic management becomes a crucial factor in the case of satellite network because of the limited availability of their resources. Currently, Internet Protocol (IP) only has minimal traffic management capabilities and provides best effort services. In th…
Fairness is the significant factor to sustain best effort delivery of network services. Now-a-days, real-time multimedia applications have evolved largely over the Internet. Most of multimedia services are unresponsive during network congestion. Unresponsive traffic streams steal most network bandwidth and starve out some other flows which are responsive during network congestion. In the presence of these unresponsive traffic flows, protection of responsive flows has become a major issue. Many Active Queue Management (AQM) based solutions have been recommended to protect responsive traffic flo…
In this paper, we have provided a summary of the design options in Satellite-ATM technology. A satellite ATM network consists of a space segment of satellites connected by inter-satellite crosslinks, and a ground segment of the various ATM networks. A satellite-ATM interface module connects the satellite network to the ATM networks and performs various call and control functions. A network control center performs various network management and resource allocation functions. Several issues such as the ATM service model, media access protocols, and traffic management issues must be considered wh…
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Western University（西安大略大学电气与计算机工程学院）
As more end devices are getting connected, the Internet will become more congested. Various congestion control techniques have been developed either on transport or network layers. Active Queue Management (AQM) is a paradigm that aims to mitigate the congestion on the network layer through active buffer control to avoid overflow. However, finding the right parameters for an AQM scheme is challenging, due to the complexity and dynamics of the networks. On the other hand, the Explicit Congestion Notification (ECN) mechanism is a solution that makes visible incipient congestion on the network lay…
Congestion Control (CC), as the core networking task to efficiently utilize network capacity, received great attention and widely used in various Internet communication applications such as 5G, Internet-of-Things, UAN, and more. Various CC algorithms have been proposed both on network and transport layers such as Active Queue Management (AQM) algorithm and Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) congestion control mechanism. But it is hard to model dynamic AQM/TCP system and cooperate two algorithms to obtain excellent performance under different communication scenarios. In this paper, we explore …
Internet performance is tightly related to the properties of TCP and UDP protocols, jointly responsible for the delivery of the great majority of Internet traffic. It is well understood how these protocols behave under FIFO queuing and what the network congestion effects. However, no comprehensive analysis is available when flow-aware mechanisms such as per-flow scheduling and dropping policies are deployed. Previous simulation and experimental results leave a number of unanswered questions. In the paper, we tackle this issue by modeling via a set of fluid non-linear ODEs the instantaneous thr…
In this paper we present a model to study the end-to-end delay performance of a satellite-ATM netowrk. We describe a satellite-ATM network architecture. The architecture presents a trade-off between the on-board switching/processing features and the complexity of the satellite communication systems. The end-to-end delay of a connection passing through a satellite constellation consists of the transmission delay, the uplink and downlink ground terminal-satellite propagation delay, the inter-satellite link delays, the on-board switching, processing and buffering delays. In a broadband satellite …
In this paper we introduced Modified Sized-based Queue Management as a dropping scheme that aims to fairly prioritize and allocate more service to VoIP traffic over bulk data like FTP as the former one usually has small packet size with less impact to the network congestion. In the same time, we want to guarantee that this prioritization is fair enough for both traffic types. On the other hand we study the total link delay over the congestive link with the attempt to alleviate this congestion as much as possible at the by function of early congestion notification. Our M-SQM scheme has been eva…
This paper suggests a new model for the transmission of TCP traffic over IEEE 802.11 using the new features of IEEE 802.11ac . The paper examines a first step in this direction and as such we first consider a single TCP connection, which is typical in a home environment. We show that when the IEEE 802.11ac MAC is aware of QoS TCP traffic, using Reverse Direction improves the TCP Goodput in tens of percentages compared to the traditional contention based channel access. In an error-free channel this improvement is 20% while in an error-prone channel the improvement reaches 60%, also using blind…
Congestion control is vastly important in computer networks. Arising naturally from the bursty nature of Internet traffic, congestion plagues not only the network edge, but also the network core. Many remedies have been proposed to fight congestion; active queue management (AQM) is one such proposal. AQM seeks to prevent congestion by actively avoiding it. Some queuing disciplines such as Random Early Detection (RED) will prematurely drop a random packet (with some probability) when the queue nears capacity to signal the sender to back off. However, RED utilizes queue length as a mechanism to …
We study TCP flows coexistence between Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games (MMORPGs) and other TCP applications, by taking World of Warcraft (WoW) and a file transfer application based on File Transfer Protocol (FTP) as an example. Our focus is on the effects of the sender buffer size and FTP cross-traffic on the queuing delay experienced by the (MMORPG) game traffic. A network scenario corresponding to a real life situation in an ADSL access network has been simulated by using NS2. Three TCP variants, namely TCP SACK, TCP New Reno, and TCP Vegas, have been considered for cross-traff…
Heterogeneous wireless networks have evolved to reach application requirements for low latency and high throughput on Internet access. Recent studies have improved network performance employing the Multipath TCP, which aggregates flows from heterogeneous wireless interfaces in a single connection. Although existing proposals are powerful, coupled congestion control algorithms are currently limited because of the high variation in path delays, bandwidth and loss rate, typical from heterogeneous wireless networks, even more over concurrent multipath transmissions. These transmissions experience …
Closed-loop flow control protocols, such as the prominent implementation TCP, are prevalent in the Internet, today. TCP has continuously been improved for greedy traffic sources to achieve high throughput over networks with large bandwidth delay products. Recently, the increasing use for streaming and interactive applications, such as voice and video, has shifted the focus towards its delay performance. Given the need for real-time communication of non-greedy sources via TCP, we present an estimation method for performance evaluation of closed-loop flow control protocols. We characterize an en…
Like many big science projects, the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) has multiple geographic locations among which large amounts of data must be transferred. One particular type of data, crosstalk-corrected images, must be moved from South America to North America under stringent deadline requirements. LSST is provisioning an international network with bandwidth guarantees to handle this traffic. In prior work, we re-examined TCP congestion control for this use case and found that TCP throughput can approach wire speeds. This work shows that the Hierarchical Token Bucket (HTB) provides a…
Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) carries most of the traffic on the Internet these days. There are several implementations of TCP, and the most important difference among them is their mechanism for controlling congestion. One of the methods for determining type of a TCP is active probing. Active probing considers a TCP implementation as a black box, sends different streams of data to the appropriate host. According to the response received from the host, it figures out the type of TCP version implemented. TCP Behavior Inference Tool (TBIT) is an implemented tool that uses active probing to…
We are interested in unicast traffic over wireless networks that employ constructive inter-session network coding, including single-hop and multi-hop schemes. In this setting, TCP flows do not fully exploit the network coding opportunities due to their bursty behavior and due to the fact that TCP is agnostic to the underlying network coding. In order to improve the performance of TCP flows over coded wireless networks, we take the following steps. First, we formulate the problem as network utility maximization and we present a distributed solution. Second, mimicking the structure of the optima…
A new method of estimating some statistical characteristics of TCP flows in the Internet is developed in this paper. For this purpose, a new set of random variables (referred to as observables) is defined. When dealing with sampled traffic, these observables can easily be computed from sampled data. By adopting a convenient mouse/elephant dichotomy also dependent on traffic, it is shown how these variables give a reliable statistical representation of the number of packets transmitted by large flows during successive time intervals with an appropriate duration. A mathematical framework is deve…
Segment retransmissions are an essential tool in assuring reliable end-to-end communication in the Internet. Their crucial role in TCP design and operation has been studied extensively, in particular with respect to identifying non-conformant, buggy, or underperforming behaviour. However, TCP segment retransmissions are often overlooked when examining and analyzing large traffic traces. In fact, some have come to believe that retransmissions are a rare oddity, characteristically associated with faulty network paths, which, typically, tend to disappear as networking technology advances and link…
We study the buffering requirements for zero cell loss for TCP/IP over satellite links using the available bit rate (ABR) and unspecified bit rate (UBR) services of asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) networks. For the ABR service, we explore the effect of feedback delay (a factor which depends upon the position of the bottleneck), the switch scheme used, and background variable bit rate (VBR) traffic. It is shown that the buffer requirement for TCP over ABR is independent of the number of TCP sources, but depends on the aforementioned factors. For the UBR service, we show that the buffer require…
Cellular phones, wireless laptops, personal portable devices that supports both voice and data access are all examples of communicating devices that uses wireless communication. Sine TCP/IP (and UDP) is the dominant technology in use in the internet, it is expected that they will be used (and they are currently) over wireless connections. In this paper, we investigate the performance of the TCP (and UDP) over IEEE802.11 wireless MAC protocol. We investigate the performance of the TCP and UDP assuming three different traffic patterns. First bulk transmission where the main concern is the throug…
Multipath-TCP receives a lot of attention recently and can potentially improve quality of service for both private and commercial users. It leverages the multiple available paths and send packets through all the available paths. The growing of Mutipath TCP has received a growing interest from both researchers who publish a growing number of articles on the topic and the vendors since Apple has decided to use Multipath TCP on its smartphones and tablets to support the Siri voice recognition application. In this paper, we study the performance of Multipath TCP from its impact on the stability of…
TCP is designed for networks with assumption that major losses occur only due to congestion of network traffic. On a wireless network TCP misinterprets the transmission losses due to bit errors and handoffs as losses caused by congestion, and triggers congestion control mechanisms. Because of its end to end delivery model, congestion handling and avoidance mechanisms, TCP has been widely accepted as Transport layer protocol for internetworks. Extension of Internetworks over wireless links is inevitable with the spread of ubiquitous computing and mobile communications. This paper presents study…
We develop analytical models for estimating the energy spent by stations (STAs) in infrastructure WLANs when performing TCP controlled file downloads. We focus on the energy spent in radio communication when the STAs are in the Continuously Active Mode (CAM), or in the static Power Save Mode (PSM). Our approach is to develop accurate models for obtaining the fraction of times the STA radios spend in idling, receiving and transmitting. We discuss two traffic models for each mode of operation: (i) each STA performs one large file download, and (ii) the STAs perform short file transfers. We evalu…
To increase the scalability of Software Defined Networks (SDNs), flow aggregation schemes have been proposed to merge multiple mouse flows into an elephant aggregated flow for traffic engineering. In this paper, we first notice that the user bit-rate requirements of mouse flows are no longer guaranteed in the aggregated flow since the flow rate decided by the TCP allocation is usually different from the desired bit-rate of each user. To address the above issue, we present a novel architecture, named Flexible Flow And Rate Management (F$^2$ARM), to control the rates of only a few flows in order…
The behaviour of the TCP AIMD algorithm is known to cause queue length oscillations when congestion occurs at a router output link. Indeed, due to these queueing variations, end-to-end applications experience large delay jitter. Many studies have proposed efficient Active Queue Management (AQM) mechanisms in order to reduce queue oscillations and stabilize the queue length. These AQM are mostly improvements of the Random Early Detection (RED) model. Unfortunately, these enhancements do not react in a similar manner for various network conditions and are strongly sensitive to their initial sett…
This paper studies the use of a traffic optimization technique named TCM (Tunneling, Compressing and Multiplexing) to reduce the bandwidth of MMORPGs (Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games), which employ TCP to provide a soft real-time service. In order to optimize the traffic and to improve bandwidth efficiency, TCM can be applied when the packets of a number of players share the same link, which occurs in some scenarios, as e.g. the traffic between proxies and servers of game-supporting infrastructures. First, TCP/IP headers are compressed using standard algorithms that avoid sendi…
