Rate Control Protocol Research Articles

Global stability of the Rate Control Protocol (RCP) and some implications for protocol design

Global stability is an important aspect associated with the analysis and performance of closed-loop systems with feedback delays. The presence of time delays in the feedback makes the system infinite-dimensional. Establishing conditions for global stability of delay models is a non-trivial task when the system is non-linear, and the feedback delays are heterogeneous. In this paper, at the level of theoretical interest, we first derive a simply stated sufficient condition for the global asymptotic stability for a non-linear delay differential equation with heterogeneous time delays. We then apply the analytical results to the Rate Control Protocol (RCP), which is a congestion control protocol that relies on explicit feedback from routers. We establish that RCP can be made globally asymptotically stable — an important property of the algorithm previously unknown. We are able to deduce a condition for global stability of RCP, in the presence of heterogeneous feedback delays. The condition for stability favors the design choice of having only rate mismatch, as opposed to both rate mismatch and queue size, in the protocol definition. The analysis is corroborated with some numerical simulations.

Transmission Rate Sampling and Selection for Reliable Wireless Multicast

The multicast communication concept offers a scalable and efficient method for many classes of applications; however, its potential remains largely unexploited when it comes to link-layer multicasting in wireless local area networks. The fundamental lacking feature for this is a transmission rate control mechanism that offers higher transmission performance and lower channel utilization, while ensuring the reliability of wireless multicast transmissions. This is much harder to achieve in a scalable manner for multicast when compared with unicast transmissions, which employs explicit acknowledgment mechanisms for rate control. This article introduces EWRiM, a reliable multicast transmission rate control protocol for IEEE 802.11 networks. It adapts the transmission rate sampling concept to multicast through an aggregated receiver feedback scheme and combines it with a sliding window forward error correction (FEC) mechanism for ensuring reliability at the link layer. An inherent novelty of EWRiM is the close interaction of its FEC and transmission rate selection components to address the performance-reliability tradeoff in multicast communications. The performance of EWRiM was tested in three scenarios with intrinsically different traffic patterns; namely, music streaming scenario, large data frame delivery scenario, and an IoT scenario with frequent distribution of small data packets. Evaluation results demonstrate that the proposed approach adapts well to all of these realistic multicast traffic scenarios and provides significant improvements over the legacy multicast- and unicast-based transmissions.

Simulated Performance of SCTP and TFRC Over MANETs

Mobile ad-hoc networks (MANETs) are composed of mobile nodes communicating through wireless medium, without any fixed centralized infrastructure. Providing quality of service (QoS) support to multimedia streaming applications over MANETs is vital. This paper focuses on QoS support, provided by the stream control transmission protocol (SCTP) and the TCP-friendly rate control (TFRC) protocol to multimedia streaming applications over MANETs. In this study, three QoS parameters were considered jointly: (1) packet delivery ratio (PDR), (2) end-to-end delay, (3) and throughput. Specifically, the authors analyzed and compared the simulated performance of the SCTP and TFRC transport protocols for delivering multimedia streaming over MANETs. Two simulation scenarios were conducted to study the impact of traffic load and node speed (mobility) to their performance. Based on the simulation results, the authors found that the PDR and the end-to-end delay of TFRC are slightly better than those of SCTP in both scenarios. Additionally, the performance of SCTP is significantly better than TFRC in terms of throughput.

Efficient File Dissemination in Data Center Networks With Priority-Based Adaptive Multicast

In today’s data center networks (DCN), cloud applications commonly disseminate files from a single source to a group of receivers for service deployment, data replication, software upgrade, etc. For these group communication tasks, recent advantages of software-defined networking (SDN) provide bandwidth-efficient ways—they enable DCN to establish and control a large number of explicit multicast trees on demand. Yet, the benefits of data center multicast are severely limited, since there does not exist a scheme that could prioritize multicast transfers respecting the performance metrics wanted by today’s cloud applications, such as pursuing small mean completion times or meeting soft-time deadlines with high probability. To this end, we propose PAM (Priority-based Adaptive Multicast), a preemptive, decentralized, and ready-deployable rate control protocol for data center multicast. At the core, switches in PAM explicitly control the sending rates of concurrent multicast transfers based on their desired priorities and the available link bandwidth. With different policies of priority generation, PAM supports a range of scheduling goals. We not only prototype PAM upon the emerged P4-based programmable switch with novel approximation designs, but also evaluate its performance with ns3-based extensive simulations. Results imply that PAM is ready-deployable; it converges very fast, has negligible impacts on coexisting TCP traffic, and always performs near-optimal priority-based multicast scheduling.

Effect of two forms of feedback on the performance of the Rate Control Protocol (RCP)

The Rate Control Protocol (RCP) uses explicit feedback from routers to control network congestion. RCP estimates it’s fair rate from two forms of feedback: rate mismatch and queue size. An important design question that remains open in RCP is whether the presence of queue size feedback is helpful, given the presence of feedback from rate mismatch. The feedback from routers to end-systems is time-delayed, and may introduce instabilities and complex nonlinear dynamics. Delay dynamical systems are often modeled using delay differential equations to facilitate a mathematical analysis of their performance and dynamics. The RCP models with and without queue size feedback give rise to two distinct nonlinear delay differential equations. Earlier work on this design question was based on methods of linear systems theory. For further progress, it is quite natural to employ nonlinear techniques. In this study, we approach this design question using tools from control and bifurcation theory. The analytical results reveal that the removal of queue feedback could enhance both stability and convergence properties. Further, using Poincaré normal forms and center manifold theory, we investigate two nonlinear properties, namely, the type of the Hopf bifurcation and the asymptotic stability of the bifurcating limit cycles. We show that the presence of queue feedback in the RCP can lead to a sub-critical Hopf bifurcation, which would give rise either to the onset of large amplitude limit cycles or to unstable limit cycles. Whereas, in the absence of queue feedback, the Hopf bifurcation is always super-critical, and the bifurcating limit cycles are stable. The analysis is complemented with computations and some packet-level simulations as well. In terms of design, our study suggests that the presence of both forms of feedback may be detrimental to the performance of RCP.

Do we need two forms of feedback in the Rate Control Protocol (RCP)?

There is considerable interest in the networking community in explicit congestion control as it may allow the design of a fair, stable, low loss, low delay, and high utilization network. The Rate Control Protocol (RCP) is an example of such a congestion control protocol. The current design of RCP suggests that it should employ two forms of feedback; i.e. rate mismatch and queue size, in order to manage its flow control algorithms. An outstanding design question in RCP is whether the presence of queue size feedback is useful, given the presence of feedback based on rate mismatch. To address this question, we conduct analysis (stability and Hopf bifurcation) and packet-level simulations. The analytical results reveal that the presence of queue size feedback in the protocol specification may induce a sub-critical Hopf bifurcation, which can lead to undesirable system behavior. The analysis is corroborated by numerical computations and some packet-level simulations. Based on our work, the suggestion for RCP is to only include feedback based on rate mismatch in the design of the protocol.

A Non-Monetary Mechanism for Optimal Rate Control Through Efficient Cost Allocation

This paper proposes a practical non-monetary mechanism that induces the efficient solution to the optimal rate control problem, where each client optimizes its request arrival rate to maximize its own net utility individually, and at the Nash Equilibrium the total net utility of the system is also maximized. Existing mechanisms typically rely on monetary exchange which requires additional infrastructure that is not always available. Instead, the proposed mechanism is based on efficient cost allocation, where the cost is in terms of non-monetary metric, such as average delay or request loss rate. Specifically, we present an efficient cost allocation rule for the server to determine the target cost of each client. We then propose an intelligent policy for the server to control the costs of the clients to achieve the efficient allocation. Furthermore, we design a distributed rate control protocol with provable convergence to the Nash Equilibrium of the system. The effectiveness of our mechanism is extensively evaluated via simulations of both delay allocation and loss rate allocation against baseline mechanisms with classic control policies.

Modeling Reliable M2M/IoT Traffic Over Random Access Satellite Links in Non-Saturated Conditions

Nowadays, Machine-to-Machine and Internet of Things traffic sources puts the terrestrial networks under great pressure. While 5G is still on its way, satellites are used to deliver a fraction of such an enormous traffic rate. In this work, we investigate the use of the Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP) to reliably deliver Machine-to-Machine and Internet of Things traffic in a push fashion, which also implements a Selective Repeat Automatic Repeat reQuest and a sender-based variant of the TCP Friendly Rate Control protocol. We aim at providing an analytical model to evaluate the working point of the system in non-saturated conditions as a function of the MAC parameters in use, when such a closed-loop congestion control mechanism is in use over a random access satellite channel. The proposed analytical model is then validated against simulation results, showing a good precision.

Efficient Traffic Engineering Strategies for Improving the Performance of TCP Friendly Rate Control Protocol

Multimedia services will play a prominent role in the next generation of internet. With increasing real time requirements, internet technology has to provide Quality of Service (QoS) for various kinds of real time streaming services. When the bandwidth required exceeds the available network resources, network paths can get congested, which results in a delay in packet delivery and packet loss. This situation leads to the design of new strategies for congestion avoidance and control. One of the popular and appropriate congestion control mechanisms that is useful in transmitting multimedia applications in the transport layer is TCP Friendly Rate Control Protocol (TFRC). However, TFRC still suffers from packet loss and delay due to long distance heavy traffic and network fluctuations. This paper introduces a number of key concerns like enhanced Round Trip Time (RTT) and Retransmission Time Out (RTO) calculations, Enhanced Average Loss Interval (ALI) methods and improved Time to Live (TTL) features are applied to TFRC to enhance the performance of TFRC over wired networks.

The impact of networking algorithms on the power consumption of routers

In the push towards greener ICT, there is a need to examine the energy savings possible in the design of network infrastructure and each network component. The focus of this paper is to evaluate the impact of routing algorithms on the power consumption of network routers. In a comparison of the power consumption of a number of routers implementing different routing protocols on the open source NetFPGA board, our results show the Bloom filter-based zFilter forwarding node is the greenest router. The rate control protocol (RCP) router and the precision time protocol (PTP) router consume almost identical power, which is about 1.1–1.6% higher than that of the reference router. This higher power consumption of RCP and PTP routers is attributed to the 3.6%–4.7% higher power consumption in the 3.3-V power component of the total power consumption, which is due to the higher router design complexity. Furthermore, we examined the impact of scaling down the core operational clock frequency to demonstrate the merits of energy proportional routing in each of the routers. The zFilter, operating at 62.5 MHz, outperforms the RCP, PTP, and the reference routers operating at 125 MHz, in terms of both packet loss and throughput. In addition, the zFilter operating at 62.5 MHz consumes around 10.9–11.2% less power than the reference router operating at 125 MHz. We analyze the architecture of each router to further explain these results.

Data transmission optimization algorithm for network utility maximization in wireless sensor networks

We provide a joint scheme for rate control, scheduling, routing, and power control protocol for wireless sensor networks based on compressive sensing. Using a network utility maximization formulation, we present cross-layer optimization solutions using Lagrangian multipliers in the transport, network, media access control, and physical layers. Inspired by compressive sensing, we focus on the construction of utility functions based on the constraints of the link capacity, rate, routing, and power to decrease the computational cost, accelerate the convergence rate, and degrade the error ratio. The optimization solutions are developed by solving the optimization model of network utility maximization. We prove the effectiveness by the theory analysis at the stability of the transmission rate and error ratio. Finally, simulation results demonstrate the performance in terms of stability of the error ratio of compressive sensing, energy consumption, and transmission delay in wireless sensor networks.

A Congestion Control Mechanism for Streaming Media Transmission over Wireless Environment

TFRC (TCP-Friendly Rate Control Protocol) has been recognized as a relatively good mechanism for TCP friendly congestion control on cable network. However, TFRC is sensitive to the network status and cannot actually distinguish congestion losses and noncongestion losses well in wireless networks. The high error rates and large delay of wireless networks result in significant performance degradation and poor quality of the streaming media transmission service in transmission. To solve this problem, this paper proposes an Explicit Congestion Notification TCP (ECN-TCP) based TCP Friendly Wireless streaming Media Rate Control (TF-WMRC) congestion control mechanism. This mechanism improves TFRC and conjunctions with ECN and RED (Random Early Detection) methods, differentiating correctly congestion losses and wireless error losses and effectively alleviating the throughput degradation caused by wireless links. Performance evaluation of network efficiency, TCP friendliness and streaming media stability in NS2 simulation platform has shown that it is a good congestion control mechanism for streaming media transmission in wireless environment.

Security and networking for cyber‐physical systems

Cyber-physical systems (CPS) are emerging research areas that involve multiple disciplines. Two critical components in CPS are networking technologies and security. Because of the multi-disciplinary nature, the networking and security of CPS expand beyond traditional computing domains and have to consider the impact of applied physical systems. Therefore, new innovations are required such as novel transmission technologies, networking protocols, architectures, and security solutions. As a result, a significant amount of research work is expected for new models, performance analysis as well as evaluation, prototypes, and testbeds. This special issue focuses on research interests and activities related to networking and security in SmartGrid, Transportation and Medical Systems, with an emphasis on original analytical, experimental, and systems-related papers in these target domains. After a very careful review of the many highly qualified submissions, the editorial committee accepted a total of nine papers into this special issue. Among these, three papers are related to SmartGrid security, two relating to CPS security-driven wireless communication, three relating to CPS wireless backbone architectures and protocols, and one relating to medical system security. In SmartGrid security, Baumeister and Dong propose a security identity management solution for SmartGrid. Another work by Wen et al. designs a credit-based incentive tariff scheme. Yang, Chang, and Yu develop a solution to identify false data injection attack in power system. In security-driven CPS wireless communications, Si, Sun, and Zhang propose a solution to dynamically manage wireless spectrum based on quality of service and security to improve transportation CPS surveillance. The paper by An et al. integrates vulnerability into minimum cost-based wireless routing for sensor CPS. Kanjee and Liu propose a solution to relay-based authentication solution for medical systems. In wireless architectures and protocols, Yang et al. design a location-aware routing for vehicular CPS, Wang et al. develop a solution to collaborative measurement on network traffic that is friendly to transmission control protocol rate control protocols. Bhandare et al. evaluate the collision avoidance performance in wireless ad hoc backbone for CPS systems. On behalf of the editorial committee, we express our sincere thanks to all authors and reviewers for their significant contribution to this special issue. We are also grateful to Editors-in-Chief Drs. Chen Hsiao Hwa and Hamid R. Sharif and to the editorial staff for their excellent help and assistance. Without their contributions, it would have been impossible to produce this special issue. We hope that this special issue will inspire interested scholars to get involved in this promising and active research area.

Research on Self-adaptive TFRC Congestion Control of Streaming Media in Wireless Network

Transport layer protocol, for lack of effective congestion control, made an irrational bandwidth utilization ratio between UDP and TCP. Especially for streaming media transport which is easily to cause the network congestion. TFRC (TCP-friendly rate control protocol) congestion control mechanism had solved the problem effectively. However, in the high bit error rate environment of wireless network, TFPC would mistake the bit error for congestion lost packet that degrades throughput excessively. Concerning this issue, this paper put forward a self-adaptive TFRC mechanism which distinguishes congest and bit error effectively by distinguishing parameters, and adjusts the transmission rate dynamically. Simulation result reveals that self-adaptive TFRC mechanism can use link efficiently, reduce delay variation and meet the live transmission requirement of streaming media in wireless network.

Performance Comparison of different Congestion Control Protocols in Hybrid Network

Widely implemented topology in Internet is Heterogeneous networks which are a combination of wired and wireless networks. Due to high bandwidth availability at wired links and high delayed products at wireless links, bottleneck situation is generated at Access Point and it has to face severe Congestion consequences. Some of the most known and recent protocols developed to provide faster and lighter congestion control are TCP (Transmission Control Protocol) and the Rate Control Protocol (RCP). This paper provides performance comparison of TCP, RCP+ and our proposed algorithm RCP++ in hybrid network. General Terms TCPTransmission Control Protocol, RCP – Rate Control Protocol,

An End-To-End Rate Control Protocol for Intermittently Connected Networks

In this study, we propose a rate control algorithm for intermittently connected networks (ICNs), a type of delay/disruption-tolerant network. The different characteristics of ICNs compared with traditional TCP/IP networks lead to problems that do not occur in legacy networks, such as network partitioning, long and varying delays, high loss probability, and asymmetric data transmission rates. To overcome these issues, much recent research has been carried out. However, while the results have helped achieve smooth communication between nodes, there are still certain shortcomings. For example, if many messages are input by the nodes in a network, these schemes do not work well. To resolve this problem, we propose a novel sending rate control algorithm in an additive increase/multiplicative decrease manner. To detect network congestion, we measure the receiving rate, one-way delay, and average number of copies. When the measured receiving rate increases, the congestion window (cwnd) also increases; otherwise, cwnd decreases. The simulations show that the proposed algorithm can adjust the sending rate of nodes to avoid network congestion and provide a fair share of the network for the nodes.

Seamless Mobility of Heterogeneous Networks Based on Markov Decision Process

A mobile terminal will expect a number of handoffs within its call duration. In the event of a mobile call, when a mobile node moves from one cell to another, it should connect to another access point within its range. In case there is a lack of support of its own network, it must changeover to another base station. In the event of moving on to another network, quality of service parameters need to be considered. In our study we have used the Markov decision process approach for a seamless handoff as it gives the optimum results for selecting a network when compared to other multiple attribute decision making processes. We have used the network cost function for selecting the network for handoff and the connection reward function, which is based on the values of the quality of service parameters. We have also examined the constant bit rate and transmission control protocol packet delivery ratio. We used the policy iteration algorithm for determining the optimal policy. Our enhanced handoff algorithm outperforms other previous multiple attribute decision making methods.

Dynamic Control of Airport Departures: Algorithm Development and Field Evaluation

This paper proposes dynamic-programming-based algorithms for controlling the departure process at congested airports. These algorithms, which are called Pushback Rate Control protocols, predict the departure throughput of the airport and recommend a rate at which to release aircraft from their gates in order to control congestion. This paper describes the design and field testing of a variant of Pushback Rate Control at Boston airport in 2011 and the development of a decision support tool for its implementation. The analysis of data from the field trials shows that during eight 4-h test periods, fuel use was reduced by an estimated 9 U.S. tons (2650 U.S. gallons), and taxi-out times were reduced by an average of 5.3 min for the 144 flights that were held at the gate.

TCP‐polite rate control based on cooperative measurement

AbstractBased on the cooperative measurement of new congestion metric instead of drop ratio and round‐trip time, a new cooperative transmission control mechanism, called TCP‐polite rate control (TPRC), is proposed. In this scheme, the congestion metric of network is obtained with cooperative measurement and feeds back to rate‐based pacing mechanism, thus keeping the transmission rate at the lower bound of available bandwidth. Simulation results show that TPRC scheme outperforms TCP and TCP‐friendly rate control protocol in terms of fast‐start, efficiency, and fairness. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Celerity: A Low-Delay Multi-Party Conferencing Solution

In this paper, we revisit the problem of multi-party conferencing from a practical perspective, and to rethink the design space involved in this problem. We believe that an emphasis on low end-to-end delays between any two parties in the conference is a must, and the source sending rate in a session should adapt to bandwidth availability and congestion. We present Celerity, a multi-party conferencing solution specifically designed to achieve our objectives. It is entirely Peer-to-Peer (P2P), and as such eliminating the cost of maintaining centrally administered servers. It is designed to deliver video with low end-to-end delays, at quality levels commensurate with available network resources over arbitrary network topologies where bottlenecks can be anywhere in the network. This is in contrast to commonly assumed P2P scenarios where bandwidth bottlenecks reside only at the edge of the network. The highlight in our design is a distributed and adaptive rate control protocol, that can discover and adapt to arbitrary topologies and network conditions quickly, converging to efficient link rate allocations allowed by the underlying network. In accordance with adaptive link rate control, source video encoding rates are also dynamically controlled to optimize video quality in arbitrary and unpredictable network conditions. We have implemented Celerity in a prototype system, and demonstrate its superior performance over existing solutions in a local experimental testbed and over the Internet.