Key Network Performance Metrics Research Articles

Software-Defined Networking Meets Software-Defined Radio in Mobile ad hoc Networks: State of the Art and Future Directions

The aims of this survey article are to elaborate on cross-layer optimization, Software-Defined Networking (SDN) and Software-Defined Radio (SDR) as separate domains of wireless network design for which a unified view has not been adequately considered to date and present lessons learned, with a view towards the challenges associated with SDN-SDR interaction that would facilitate benefits in cross-layer optimization of mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs). We focus on MANETs because ( <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">${i}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> ) they are still at the forefront of technology, and in some scenarios they are the only meaningful option for establishing communication; ( <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">ii</i> ) they expose the full potential and benefits of coexistence and interaction of SDN and SDR, in terms of optimizing key performance indicators. While SDN and SDR are mature technologies, their interaction and joint consideration have been largely overlooked. Current SDN approaches do not span the physical (PHY) and medium-access control (MAC) layers, but they rather concentrate on network-level routing and traffic flow optimization. As a result, PHY- and MAC-layer related parameters which notoriously affect key network performance metrics remain static or at best are adapted based on some heuristic or local approaches. On the other hand, the reach of SDR architectures is restricted to the PHY and MAC layers. We discuss the state of the art of cross-layer optimization, SDN and SDR, and current challenges associated with coexistence and interaction of SDN and SDR. Such an interaction would extend the span of SDN to PHY and MAC layers and lead to realizations of centralized approaches across all layers so as to control and optimize parameters, towards global network objectives. It would also create a bridge between centralized network control that is inherent in SDN and the distributed nature of MANETs, with the add-on features of flexible and fast PHY and MAC layer adaptation offered by SDR, for solid, autonomous and ultimately better network control implementations that span all layers, towards realizing and implementing the holy grail of real cross-layer optimization.

Routing and wavelength assignment vs. EDFA reliability performance in optical backbone networks: An operational cost perspective

A failure in optical backbone network can cause tremendous consequences as a substantial number of connections often each carrying a large amount of data can be interrupted. Therefore, high reliability performance is essential for the network operators. Many existing works that aim at improving network reliability performance implicitly assume that the lifetime of devices is constant and independent of the traffic load. However, the reliability performance of a device is related to its occupancy. For example, the failure rate of erbium doped fiber amplifier (EDFA) can be expressed as a function of the number of amplified wavelengths. On the other hand, the choice of routing and wavelength assignment (RWA) algorithm impacts the link load and, as a consequence, can influence the number of EDFA failures in the network.In this paper we examine how RWA can impact the failure reparation related network operational costs. Several types of RWA approaches are considered, namely load-balancing, energy-awareness, and reliability-awareness. Among all the considered RWA algorithms, the reliability-aware RWA (RA-RWA) approach leverages on EDFA reliability profile to reduce the number of EDFA failures in the network and the related operational costs.The simulation results show that the RWA algorithm impacts in a significant way the operational costs caused by EDFA failures. The cost associated with reparation of an EDFA decreases by 7.8% (in case of RA-RWA) and increases by up to 40% (in case of a load-balancing approach) compared to the classical Shortest Path (SP) approach. Moreover, the cost caused by connection rerouting due to link unavailability triggered by EDFA failure exhibits a 20% decrease (RA-RWA) and up to 94% increase (energy-aware algorithm). We also analyze some key network performance metrics that may be affected by RWA, including blocking probability, link occupancy distribution, and path length.

Smarter Cities With Parked Cars as Roadside Units

Real-time monitoring of traffic density, road congestion, public transportation, and parking availability are key to realizing the vision of a smarter city and, with the advent of vehicular networking technologies, such as IEEE 802.11p and WAVE, this information can now be gathered directly from the vehicles in an urban area. To act as a backbone to the network of moving vehicles, collecting, aggregating, and disseminating their information, the use of parked cars has been proposed as an alternative to costly deployments of fixed roadside units. In this paper, we introduce novel mechanisms for parking vehicles to self-organize and form efficient vehicular support networks that provide widespread coverage to a city. These mechanisms are innovative in their ability to keep the network of parked cars under continuous optimization, in their multi-criteria decision process that can be focused on key network performance metrics, and in their ability to manage the battery usage of each car, rotating roadside unit roles between vehicles as required. We also present the first comprehensive study of the performance of such an approach, via realistic modeling of mobility, parking, and communication, through simulations, and an experimental verification of concepts that are key to self-organization. Our analysis brings strong evidence that parked cars can serve as an alternative to fixed roadside units, and organize to form networks that can support smarter transportation and mobility.

On Performance Modeling for MANETs Under General Limited Buffer Constraint

Understanding the real achievable performance of mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) under practical network constraints is of great importance for their applications in future highly heterogeneous wireless network environments. This paper explores, for the first time, the performance modeling for MANETs under a general limited buffer constraint, where each network node maintains a limited source buffer of size $B_s$ to store its locally generated packets and also a limited shared relay buffer of size $B_r$ to store relay packets for other nodes. Based on the Queuing theory and birth-death chain theory, we first develop a general theoretical framework to fully depict the source/relay buffer occupancy process in such a MANET, which applies to any distributed MAC protocol and any mobility model that leads to the uniform distribution of nodes' locations in steady state. With the help of this framework, we then derive the exact expressions of several key network performance metrics, including achievable throughput, throughput capacity, and expected end-to-end delay. We further conduct case studies under two network scenarios and provide the corresponding theoretical/simulation results to demonstrate the application as well as the efficiency of our theoretical framework. Finally, we present extensive numerical results to illustrate the impacts of buffer constraint on the performance of a buffer-limited MANET.

Protocols and Mechanisms to Recover Failed Packets in Wireless Networks: History and Evolution

The emergence of multihop wireless networks and the increase in low-latency demands of error tolerant applications, such as voice over internet protocol, have triggered the development of new protocols and mechanisms for recovering failed packets. For example, recovering partially corrupt packets instead of retransmission has emerged as an effective way to improve key network performance metrics, such as goodput, latency, and energy consumption. A number of similar and interesting solutions have been proposed recently to either reconstruct or process corrupt packets on wireless networks. The proliferation of multimedia services on 3G and long term evolution networks, and the stringent quality of service requirements for these applications have given birth to robust codes and new error tolerant mechanisms for packet delivery. Despite years of active research in the field, we lack a comprehensive survey that summarizes recent developments in this area and highlights avenues with potential for future growth. This survey tries to fill in this void by providing a comprehensive review of the evolution of this field and underscoring areas for future research.

Wireless energy harvesting in two-way network coded cooperative communications: a stochastic approach for large scale networks

In this letter, we study the performance of network coding (NC)-aided cooperative communications in large scale networks, where the relays are able to harvest energy emitted by wireless transmissions. In particular, we derive theoretical expressions for key network performance metrics, i.e., the probability of successful data exchange and the network lifetime gain. The proposed analytical expressions are verified via extensive Monte Carlo simulations, demonstrating the potential benefits of the energy harvested by the wireless transmissions.

FD-AQM: Fairness-Aware Delay-Controlled Active Queue Management in 802.11s-Based Multi-Radio Multi-Channel Wireless Mesh Networks

Several active queue management (AQM) schemes have been proposed to address the bufferbloat issue, a long network delay and performance degradation issue caused by excess buffering of packets in network nodes. The solutions proposed up to now, however, satisfy only a subset of the key network performance metrics, i.e., end-to-end throughput, throughput fairness, and delay, in 802.11s-based multi-radio multi-channel wireless mesh networks (MRMC WMN). In this letter, we propose FD-AQM, a fairness-aware delay-controlled AQM to satisfy all three key network performance metrics simultaneously in the 802.11s-based MRMC WMN. The proposed FD-AQM achieves the goal by adopting a per-queue drop interval which is recalibrated according to the average round-trip time of flows, and a drop decision mechanism which considers average throughput as well as target delay. Through simulations, we show that FD-AQM is superior to other AQM schemes in terms of throughput and fairness.

Effect of 3 Key Factors on Average End to End Delay and Jitter in MANET

A mobile ad-hoc network (MANET) is a self-configuring infrastructure-less network of mobile devices connected by wireless links where each node or mobile device is independent to move in any desired direction and thus the links keep moving from one node to another. In such a network, the mobile nodes are equipped with CSMA/CA (carrier sense multiple access with collision avoidance) transceivers and communicate with each other via radio. In MANETs, routing is considered one of the most difficult and challenging tasks. Because of this, most studies on MANETs have focused on comparing protocols under varying network conditions. But to the best of our knowledge no one has studied the effect of other factors on network performance indicators like throughput, jitter and so on, revealing how much influence a particular factor or group of factors has on each network performance indicator. Thus, in this study the effects of three key factors, i.e. routing protocol, packet size and DSSS rate, were evaluated on key network performance metrics, i.e. average delay and average jitter, as these parameters are crucial for network performance and directly affect the buffering requirements for all video devices and downstream networks.

Wireless Energy Harvesting in Two-Way Network Coded Cooperative Communications: A Stochastic Approach for Large Scale Networks

In this letter, we study the performance of network coding (NC)-aided cooperative communications in large scale networks, where the relays are able to harvest energy emitted by wireless transmissions. In particular, we derive theoretical expressions for key network performance metrics, i.e., the probability of successful data exchange and the network lifetime gain. The proposed analytical expressions are verified via extensive Monte Carlo simulations, demonstrating the potential benefits of the energy harvested by the wireless transmissions.

A Statistical Model of Uplink Inter-Cell Interference with Slow and Fast Power Control Mechanisms

Uplink power control is in essence an interference mitigation technique that aims at minimizing the inter-cell interference (ICI) in cellular networks by reducing the transmit power levels of the mobile users while maintaining their target received signal quality levels at base stations. Power control mechanisms directly impact the interference dynamics and, thus, affect the overall achievable capacity and consumed power in cellular networks. Due to the stochastic nature of wireless channels and mobile users' locations, it is important to derive theoretical models for ICI that can capture the impact of design alternatives related to power control mechanisms. To this end, we derive and verify a novel statistical model for uplink ICI in Generalized-K composite fading environments as a function of various slow and fast power control mechanisms. The derived expressions are then utilized to quantify numerically key network performance metrics that include average resource fairness, average reduction in power consumption, and ergodic capacity. The accuracy of the derived expressions is validated via Monte-Carlo simulations. Results are generated for multiple network scenarios, and insights are extracted to assess various power control mechanisms as a function of system parameters.

Bailout forward contracts for edge-to-edge internet services

Despite the huge success of the Internet in providing basic communication services, its economic architecture needs to be upgraded so as to provide end-to-end guaranteed or more reliable services to its customers. Currently, a user or an enterprise that needs end-to-end bandwidth guarantees between two arbitrary points in the Internet for a short period of time has no way of expressing its needs. To allow these much needed basic services, we propose a single-domain edge-to-edge (g2g) dynamic capacity contracting mechanism, where a network customer can enter into a bandwidth contract on a g2g path at a future time, at a predetermined price. For practical and economic viability, such forward contracts must involve a bailout option to account for bandwidth becoming unavailable at service delivery time, and must be priced appropriately to enable Internet Service Providers (ISPs) manage risks in their contracting and investments. Our design allows ISPs to advertise point-to-point different prices for each of their g2g paths instead of the current point-to-anywhere prices, allowing discovery of better end-to-end paths, temporal flexibility and efficiency of bandwidth usage. We compute the risk-neutral prices for these g2g bailout forward contracts (BFCs), taking into account correlations between different contracts due to correlated demand patterns and overlapping paths. We apply this multiple g2g BFC framework on network models with Rocketfuel topologies. We evaluate our contracting mechanism in terms of key network performance metrics like fraction of bailouts, revenue earned by the provider, and adaptability to link failures. We also explore the tradeoffs between complexity of pricing and performance benefits of our BFC mechanism.