Browsing by Subject "network"
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Item Adaptive protocols for mobile ad hoc networks(Texas A&M University, 2005-02-17) Holland, Gavin DouglasRecent advances in low-power technologies have resulted in the proliferation of inexpensive handheld mobile computing devices. Soon, just like the Internet empow- ered a whole new world of applications for personal computers, the development and deployment of robust ubiquitous wireless networks will enable many new and exciting futuristic applications. Certain to be an important part of this future is a class of networks known as "mobile ad hoc networks." Mobile ad hoc networks (or simply "ad hoc networks") are local-area networks formed "on the spot" between collocated wireless devices. These devices self-organize by sharing information with their neigh- bors to establish communication pathways whenever and wherever they are. For ad hoc networks to succeed, however, new protocols must be developed that are capable of adapting to their dynamic nature. In this dissertation, we present a number of adaptive protocols that are designed for this purpose. We investigate new link layer mechanisms that dynamically monitor and adapt to changes in link quality, including a protocol that uses common control messages to form a tight feedback control loop for adaptation of the link data rate to best match the channel conditions perceived by the receiver. We also investigate routing protocols that adapt route selection according to network characteristics. In particular, we present two on-demand routing protocols that are designed to take advantage of the presence of multirate links. We then investigate the performance of TCP, showing how communication outages caused by link failures and routing delays can be very detrimental to its performance. In response, we present a solution to this problem that uses explicit feedback messages from the link layer about link failures to adapt TCP's behavior. Finally, we show how link failures in heterogeneous networks containing links with widely varying bandwidth and delay can cause repeated "modal" changes in capacity that TCP is slow to detect. We then present a modifed version of TCP that is capable of more rapidly detecting and adapting to these changes.Item Addressing the Consensus Problem in Real-time Using Lightweight Middleware on Distributed Devices(2012-10-19) Hall, Keith AntonWith the advent of the modern technological age, a plethora of electronic tools and devices are available in numbers as never before. While beneficial and ex-ceedingly useful, these electronic devices require users to operate them. When designing systems capable of observing and acting upon an environment, the number of devices can become unmanageable. Previously, middleware sys-tems were designed for large-scale computational systems. However, by apply-ing similar concepts and distributing logic to autonomous agents residing on the devices, a new paradigm in distributed systems research on lightweight de-vices is conceivable. Therefore, this research focuses upon the development of a lightweight middleware that can reside on small devices enabling the capabil-ity for these devices to act autonomously. In this research, analyses determined the most advantageous methods for solving this problem. Defining a set of requirements for the necessary middle-ware as well as assumptions for the environment and system in which it would operate achieved a proper research focus. By utilizing concepts already in ex-istence such as peer-to-peer networking and distributed hash tables, devices in this system could communicate effectively and efficiently. Furthermore, creat-ing custom algorithms for communicating with other devices, and collaborating on task assignments achieved an approach to solving the consensus problem in real time. The resulting middleware solution allowed a demonstration to prove the effi-cacy. Using three devices capable of observing the environment and acting up-on it, two tests highlighted the capabilities of the consensus-finding mechanism as well as the ability of the devices to respond to changes in the environment autonomously.Item Flow control techniques for real-time media applications in best-effort networks using fluid models(Texas A&M University, 2004-11-15) Konstantinou, ApostolosQuality of Service (QoS) in real-time media applications is an area of current interest because of the increasing demand for audio/video, and generally multimedia applications, over best effort networks, such as the Internet. Media applications are transported using the User Datagram Protocol (UDP) and tend to use a disproportionate amount of network bandwidth as they do not perform congestion or flow control. Methods for application QoS control are desirable to enable users to perceive a consistent media quality. This can be accomplished by either modifying current protocols at the transport layer or by implementing new control algorithms at the application layer irrespective of the protocol used at the transport layer. The objective of this research is to improve the QoS delivered to end-users in real-time applications transported over best-effort packet-switched networks. This is accomplished using UDP at the transport layer, along with adaptive predictive and reactive control at the application layer. An end-to-end fluid model is used, including the source buffer, the network and the destination buffer. Traditional control techniques, along with more advanced adaptive predictive control methods, are considered in order to provide the desirable QoS and make a best-effort network an attractive channel for interactive multimedia applications. The effectiveness of the control methods, is examined using a Simulink-based fluid-level simulator in combination with trace files extracted from the well-known network simulator ns-2. The results show that improvement in real-time applications transported over best-effort networks using unreliable transport protocols, such as UDP, is feasible. The improvement in QoS is reflected in the reduction of flow loss at the expense of flow dead-time increase or playback disruptions or both.Item Improving network routing performance in dynamic environments(Texas A&M University, 2007-04-25) Liu, YongIn this dissertation, we study methods for improving the routing performance of computer communication networks in dynamic environments. The dynamic environments we considered in this work include both network topology changes and traffic demand changes. In the first part, We propose a novel fast rerouting scheme for link state routing protocols. Link state routing protocols are widely used by today??????s ISPs on their backbone networks. The global update based rerouting of link state protocols usually takes seconds to complete which affects real time applications like Voice over IP. In our scheme, usually, only routers directly connected to failed links are involved in rerouting. For other cases, only a small number of neighboring routers are also involved. Since our scheme calculates rerouting paths in advance, rerouting can be done faster than previous reactive approaches. The computation complexity of our scheme is less than previous proactive approaches. In the second part, we study Multihoming Route Control (MRC) that is a technology used by multihomed stub networks recently. By selecting ISPs with better quality, MRC can improve routing performance of stub networks significantly. We first study the stability issue of distributed MRC and propose two methods to avoid possible oscillations of traditional MRC. The first MRC method is based on ??????optimal routing??????. The idea is to let the stub networks belonging to a same organization coordinate their MRC and thus avoid oscillations. The second method is based on ??????user-optimal routing??????. The idea is to allow MRC devices to use multiple paths for traffic to one destination network and switch traffic between paths smoothly when path quality or the traffic matrix changes. A third MRC method we propose is for MRC of traffic consisting of TCP flows of different sizes on paths with bottlenecks of limited capacity. Based on analysis of quality characteristics of bottleneck links, we propose a greedy MRC approach that works in small timescales. Simulation results show that the proposed MRC method can greatly improve routing performance for the MRC sites as well as the overall routing performance of all sites in the network.Item Performance analysis and network path characterization for scalable internet streaming(Texas A&M University, 2008-10-10) Kang, Seong-RyongDelivering high-quality of video to end users over the best-effort Internet is a challenging task since quality of streaming video is highly subject to network conditions. A fundamental issue in this area is how real-time applications cope with network dynamics and adapt their operational behavior to offer a favorable streaming environment to end users. As an effort towards providing such streaming environment, the first half of this work focuses on analyzing the performance of video streaming in best-effort networks and developing a new streaming framework that effectively utilizes unequal importance of video packets in rate control and achieves a near-optimal performance for a given network packet loss rate. In addition, we study error concealment methods such as FEC (Forward-Error Correction) that is often used to protect multimedia data over lossy network channels. We investigate the impact of FEC on the quality of video and develop models that can provide insights into understanding how inclusion of FEC affects streaming performance and its optimality and resilience characteristics under dynamically changing network conditions. In the second part of this thesis, we focus on measuring bandwidth of network paths, which plays an important role in characterizing Internet paths and can benefit many applications including multimedia streaming. We conduct a stochastic analysis of an end-to-end path and develop novel bandwidth sampling techniques that can produce asymptotically accurate capacity and available bandwidth of the path under non-trivial cross-traffic conditions. In addition, we conduct comparative performance study of existing bandwidth estimation tools in non-simulated networks where various timing irregularities affect delay measurements. We find that when high-precision packet timing is not available due to hardware interrupt moderation, the majority of existing algorithms are not robust to measure end-to-end paths with high accuracy. We overcome this problem by using signal de-noising techniques in bandwidth measurement. We also develop a new measurement tool called PRC-MT based on theoretical models that simultaneously measures the capacity and available bandwidth of the tight link with asymptotic accuracy.