TCP Friendliness Research Articles

Vivace-Distributed: A novel congestion control mechanism for JointCloud environments

As the customer base of cloud computing services continues to grow, the demand for providing cloud resources in an economic manner has become increasingly important. To incorporate multiple clouds, JointCloud has been proposed for sharing cloud services. However, efficient communication among clouds is essential to enable resource sharing in JointCloud, which poses a critical challenge. The existing congestion control mechanisms for JointCloud have been founded to be inadequate in sharing network resources effectively and fairly, resulting in performance shortcomings. The maximum achievable transmission rate is limited to only 50% of the bandwidth, and the minimum and maximum transmission rates for different clouds in JointCloud may have a difference of up to ten times in magnitude.We propose a novel distributed congestion control mechanism for the JointCloud environment, which leverages ideas from rich literature on distributed online learning. The proposed mechanism operates in a distributed manner, with an aggregative variable representing the network condition integrated into each sender’s utility function. Our theoretical analyses establish that the proposed mechanism achieves a unique Nash equilibrium, enabling fair resource allocation among all senders. Furthermore, our simulation evaluations demonstrate that the proposed mechanism outperforms the existing congestion control mechanism in JointCloud environment by achieving a 20% higher throughput in the presence of at least 1% random loss, a 50% higher throughput for short TCP flows, and a throughput ratio of 1 when sharing bandwidth with conventional mechanisms, which indicates a perfect TCP friendliness towards other mechanisms. In summary, our proposed congestion control mechanism is the first to work in a distributed manner, which improves the efficiency and fairness of the congestion control mechanism. The proposed mechanism has the potential to significantly enhance the performance of communication among clouds, making a noteworthy contribution to cloud resource sharing.

PNCTS: A Prediction and Network Coding-Based Transmission Scheme for Efficient Screen Updates Delivery in DaaS

Abstract Desktop as a Service (DaaS) provides users with flexible, customizable and highly secure cloud based virtual desktop access. As the major carrier of execution results in DaaS, screen updates play an important role in users’ quality of experience. In order to bring users the same feelings like manipulating a local device, timeliness and reliability should be balanced. However, a timely but unreliable transmission scheme (i.e. UDP) or a completely reliable transmission scheme (i.e. TCP) is inappropriate for such a transmission scenario, especially under a high-loss network. In this paper, we propose a Prediction and Network Coding based Transmission Scheme (PNCTS) for efficient screen updates delivery in DaaS. As an end-to-end partially reliable transmission scheme, it prioritizes different data obtained by partitioning screen updates and employs network coding and TFRC (TCP Friendly Rate Control) to compensate for data loss and adjust the sending rate of screen updates, respectively. To reduce the overhead of network coding, PNCTS uses a Hidden Markov Model to predict the reliability level of network and makes different encoding strategies for the data with different priorities. Simulation results show that PNCTS can improve display quality and instantaneous goodput effectively while maintaining end-to-end delay and jitter at a relatively low level under the static and time-varying network conditions.

A Single-Rate Multicast Congestion Control (SRMCC) Mechanism in Information-Centric Networking

Information-centric networking (ICN) is expected to be a candidate for future internet architecture, and it supports features such as multicast that improves bandwidth utilization and transmission efficiency. However, multicast itself does not provide congestion control. When multiple multicast groups coexist, multicast traffic may exhaust all network resources, and cause network congestion and packet loss. Additionally, traditional IP multicast congestion control mechanisms cannot be directly applied to ICN architecture. Therefore, it is necessary to consider an effective congestion control mechanism for ICN multicast. This paper proposes a single-rate multicast congestion control mechanism, called SRMCC. It supports router-assisted awareness of the network congestion state and congestion control message aggregation. Moreover, the fair shared rate estimation method is innovatively proposed to achieve protocol fairness. Most importantly, it adjusts the rate according to different congestion states indicated by the queue occupancy ratio. By introducing a rate selection factor, it can achieve a balance between packet loss rate and throughput. Experimental results show that our proposal outperforms other mechanisms in throughput, packet loss rate, total bandwidth utilization, and overhead, and achieves protocol fairness and better TCP friendliness.

Rethinking Fast and Friendly Transport in Data Center Networks

The sustainable growth of bandwidth has been an inevitable tendency in current Data Center Networks (DCN). However, the dramatic expansion of link capacity offers a remarkable challenge to the transport layer protocols of DCN, i.e., how to converge fast and enable data flow to utilize the high bandwidth effectively. Meanwhile, the new protocol should be compatible to the traditional TCP because the applications with old TCP versions are still widely deployed. Therefore, it is important to achieve a trade-off between the aggressiveness and TCP-friendliness in protocol design. In this article, we first empirically investigate why the existing typical data center TCP variants naturally fail to guarantee both fast convergence and TCP friendliness. Then, we design a new transport protocol for DCN, namely Fast and Friendly Converging (FFC), which makes independent decisions and self-adjustment through retrieving the two-dimensional congestion notification from both RTT and ECN. We further present a mathematic model to analyze its competing behavior and converging process. The results from simulation experiments and real implementation show that FFC can achieve fast convergence, thus benefiting the flow completion time. Moreover, when coexisting with the traditional TCP, FFC also presents a moderate behavior, while introducing trivial deployment overhead only at the end-hosts.

EFFICIENT ADAPTATION OF FUZZY CONTROLLER FOR SMOOTH SENDING RATE TO AVOID CONGESTION IN MULTICAST NETWORKS

This paper prefers a fuzzy-logic-based sending rate adaption scheme named FSR (Fuzzy Sending Rate) intending to improve the evenness of TCPFriendly Multicast Congestion Control (TFMCC). To mitigate fluctuation of sending rate for TFMCC sender, FSR intends, five actions and link utilization for tuning sending rate and uses a fuzzy controller to determine which operation should be reaped according to the feedback information from CLR (current limiting receiver). Asymmetrical membership functions and biased fuzzy inference rules make FSR as friendly to TCP flows as TFMCC. Simulation results show that FSR has exceptional smoothness and fine TCP Friendliness.

Efficient Adaptation of Fuzzy Controller for Smooth Sending Rate to Avoid Congestion in Multicast Networks

This paper prefers a fuzzy-logic-based sending rate adaption scheme named FSR(Fuzzy Sending Rate) intending to improve the evenness of TCPFriendly Multicast Congestion Control (TFMCC). To mitigate fluctuation of sending rate for TFMCC sender, FSR intends, five actions and link utilization for tuning sending rate and uses a fuzzy controller to determine which operation should be reaped according to the feedback information from CLR (current limiting receiver). Asymmetrical membership functions and biased fuzzy inference rules make FSR as friendly to TCP flows as TFMCC. Simulation results show that FSR has exceptional smoothness and fine TCP Friendliness.

MFAST: A Multipath Congestion Control Protocol for High Bandwidth-Delay Connection

Today, the smart devices are usually equipped with more than one network interfaces. A multipath congestion control protocol that exploits different paths to transmit data will improve the throughput and high-availability. Many multipath congestion control protocols have been developed in the literature. However, most of them are loss-based algorithms, hence they do not well utilize the bandwidth in high bandwidth-delay product (BDP) connections due to the conservative congestion control. From the single-path Fast TCP, we develop a multipath congestion control protocol, called mFast, for high BDP connections. MFast uses queueing delay to measure the congestion as Fast TCP does. Our framework is based on a network utility maximization model for multipath flows. The features of mFast such as load-balancing, TCP friendliness, and throughput improvement are verified via analysis and extensive simulations.

ARFC: Advance response function of TCP CUBIC for IoT‐based applications using big data

SummaryThe throughput of a TCP flow depends on the average size of Congestion Window (cwnd) of a congestion control mechanism being used during the communication. The size of cwnd depends upon the usage of available link bandwidth during communication. The response function is a measure of average throughput of a single TCP flow of congestion control mechanism as the level of random packet loss is varied. Nowadays, many organizations are deploying IoT based applications for the analytics of their Big Data. TCP CUBIC and TCP Compound are the default congestion control mechanisms in Linux and Microsoft Windows Operating Systems respectively. Whereas, TCP Reno which is also known as Standard TCP congestion control mechanism is act as a trademark congestion control mechanism. During communication among different IoT applications, TCP CUBIC flows use more available link bandwidth as compared to TCP Reno flows, thus, the average cwnd size of TCP CUBIC flows are greater than the TCP Reno flows. It implies that these both kinds of flows are not sharing available link fairly, which refers as low TCP friendliness of TCP CUBIC. It means that the throughput of TCP CUBIC flows is higher than the trademark congestion control mechanism, i.e., TCP Reno flows. As a result, friendliness behavior or fair share of available link bandwidth among TCP CUBIC flows and TCP Reno flows is decreased. In other words, TCP friendliness of TCP CUBIC flows is reduced. Now, it is important to decrease the average cwnd size of TCP CUBIC flows, such that available link bandwidth can be shared fairly among flows of TCP CUBIC and TCP Reno. The aim of this research is to enhance the TCP friendliness behavior of TCP CUBIC congestion control mechanism for IoT based applications using Big Data. In this paper, an Advance Response Function of TCP CUBIC (ARFC) is designed to share fairly available link bandwidth among flows of TCP CUBIC and TCP Reno. Results show that TCP friendliness behavior of TCP CUBIC is increased by using ARFC. Overall, 18.6% performance is increased by using ARFC.

TCP Wave: A new reliable transport approach for future internet

Current and future communication scenarios are very different from those in which TCP was conceived and developed, bringing new protocol requirements. Performance optimization is usually pursued with patching of the traditional TCP implementations. Following an alternative approach, TCP Wave has been designed with the primary goal to satisfy new requirements coming from current networks, such as adaptation to bandwidth/delay changes (due to mobility, dynamic switching, handover), efficient management of spurious losses as well as link interruption, optimal exploitation of very high link capacity and efficient transmission of small objects, as in most of Web applications (Web browsing, sensor apps, SCADA, M2M, etc.), irrespective of the underlying link characteristics. Protocol fairness, TCP friendliness, congestion and flow control and error recovery are also guaranteed. TCP Wave replaces the window-based transmission paradigm of the standard TCP with a burst-based transmission, the ACK-clock scheduling with a self-managed timer and the RTT-based congestion control loop with an Ack-based Capacity and Congestion Estimation (ACCE) module. As a valuable study case, the novel TCP Wave capabilities has been validated on a generic NS-3 simulation testbed where all the most challenging events impacting on transport protocol can occur.

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.

TCP-FIT: An improved TCP algorithm for heterogeneous networks

Wireless networks and large bandwidth delay product (BDP) networks are two types of challenging environments for TCP congestion control. Many congestion control algorithms have been proposed to improve the performance of TCPs in these two environments. Although these improved algorithms can achieve remarkable performance enhancements for either of the two environments, designing a congestion algorithm that performs well over heterogeneous networks that contain both wireless and large BDP links remains a great challenge. In this study, we propose a novel congestion avoidance algorithm called TCP-FIT, which can perform excellently over both wireless and large BDP links while maintaining good fairness with the standard TCP Reno algorithm. To evaluate the proposed algorithm, theoretical analysis is presented for equilibrium, network utilization, stability, TCP friendliness, RTT fairness, and responsiveness. A series of experimental results obtained using network emulators and over the “live” Internet are also presented to demonstrate the significant performance and fairness improvements of TCP-FIT compared with other state-of-the-art algorithms.

Study on Westwood Algorithm Optimization

In the scope of wireless network, traditional TCP congestion control mechanism exhibits low bandwidth utilization and poor reliability, so a congestion control protocol adaptable to the characteristics of wireless network is worthy of investigation. An intelligent gateway model with network boundary access control features has been established based on the analysis of TCP protocol. To optimize this model, loss differentiation mechanism was added and additive increasemechanism has been improved, and finally NS-2 emulation was performed with an optimized TCP Westwood algorithm (TCPW-I). It is demonstrated that TCPW-I can distinguish packet loss causes and postpone the occurrence of TCP congestion to effectively improve the throughput of TCP in wireless network circumstances, maintaining satisfying TCP friendliness and fairness of its own.

LTTP: An LT-Code Based Transport Protocol for Many-to-One Communication in Data Centers

TCP has been widely adopted in current data centers to ensure reliable data delivery. However, recently TCP Incast was found to occur in many-to-one communications with barrier-synchronized requirement, where the TCP goodput drops dramatically. Previous solutions to TCP Incast either require updating the OS/hardware to support fine-grained timers, or smartly control utilization of the switch buffer to reduce the probability of buffer overflow and packet loss. In this paper we explore a different approach to support many-to-one communication in data center networks, which we call LTTP (LT-code based Transport Protocol). LTTP improves LT (Luby Transform) code to achieve reliable UDP-based transmission by exploiting data redundancy, and employs TFRC (TCP Friendly Rate Control) to adjust the traffic sending rates at servers. NS-2 based simulation shows that the goodput of LTTP never degrades with the increase of the number of servers in many-to-one communications, and LTTP significantly outperforms DCTCP when the number of servers is large. Simulation results also demonstrate that LTTP flows can fairly share bandwidth with TCP flows.

DP-FEC: Dynamic Probing FEC for High-Performance Real-Time Interactive Video Streaming

High-quality and high-performance real-time interactive video streaming requires both keeping the highest data transmission rate and minimizing data packet loss to achieve the best possible streaming quality. TCP-friendly rate control (TFRC) is the most widely recognized mechanism for achieving relatively smooth data transmission while competing fairly with TCP flows. However, because its data transmission rate depends largely on packet loss conditions, high-quality real-time streaming suffers from a significant degradation of streaming quality due to both a reduction in the data transmission rate and data packet losses. This paper proposes the dynamic probing forward error correction (DP-FEC) mechanism that is effective for high-quality real-time streaming to maximize the streaming quality in a situation in which competing TCP flows pose packet losses to the streaming flow. DP-FEC estimates the network condition by dynamically adjusting the degree of FEC redundancy while trying to recover lost data packets. It effectively utilizes network resources and adjusts the degree of FEC redundancy to improve the playback quality at the user side while minimizing the performance impact of competing TCP flows. We describe the DP-FEC algorithm and evaluate its effectiveness using an NS-2 simulator. The results show that by effectively utilizing network resources, DP-FEC enables to retain higher streaming quality while minimizing the adverse condition on TCP performance, thus achieving TCP friendliness.

Throughput–smoothness tradeoff in preventing competing TCP from starvation

In this paper, we systematically study and demonstrate a fundamental tradeoff for TCP friendliness: in order for a congestion control protocol to maintain a certain degree of TCP friendliness, the longer its smoothness timescale is, the lower its average rate should be. Specifically, we derive the TCP-friendly rate requirements for three different smoothness timescales (i.e., milliseconds, seconds, and minutes) with flow-level queueing models, and verify the analytical results with extensive packet-level simulation results. Our flow-level queueing models indicate that the fundamental reason of the throughput–smoothness tradeoff is that TCP arrivals have different characteristics on different timescales. Finally, we propose a new TCP-friendly congestion control protocol for applications that prefer a smooth predictable rate on a multi-minute timescale, called Long-Time-Scale TCP-Friendly CBR-Like Rate Control (L-TFCBR).

Stochastic TCP friendliness: Expanding the design space of TCP-friendly traffic control protocols

While the current definition of TCP friendliness has enabled a wide variety of traffic control protocols other than TCP, it still considerably restricts the design space of TCP-friendly traffic control protocols. For example, some multimedia streaming applications prefer a smooth sending rate on a time scale of tens of seconds, however, a UDP flow maintaining such a long smoothness time scale is naturally not TCP friendly by the current definition. In this paper, we propose an innovative method to relatively compare the degrees of TCP friendliness of different traffic control protocols, and use it to define a new class of TCP friendliness definitions, called stochastic TCP friendliness (STF). STF greatly expands the design space of TCP-friendly traffic control protocols, while still effectively maintaining the desired fairness of the Internet. To demonstrate the expanded design space, we also develop a new congestion control protocol, called TCP-friendly CBR-Like Rate Control (TFCBR), for multimedia streaming applications which do not require a high sending rate but prefer a smooth sending rate on a time scale of tens of seconds. TFCBR is stochastically TCP friendly, however, it is not TCP friendly by the current definition.

An Improved TCP Friendly Rate Control Algorithm for Wireless Networks

SUMMARY TCP Friendly Rate Control (TFRC) has been widely used in the Internet multimedia streaming applications. However, performance of traditional TFRC algorithm degrades significantly when d eployed over wireless networks. Although numerous TFRC variants have been proposed to improve the performance of TFRC over wireless networks, designing a TFRC algorithm with graceful performance both in throughput and fairness still remains a great challenge. In this paper, a novel T FRC algorithm, named TFRC-FIT, is proposed to improve the performance of TFRC over wireless environments. In the proposed approach, the behavior of multiple TFRC flows is simulated in single connection, while the number of simulated flows is adjusted by the network queuing delay. Thr ough this mechanism, TFRC-FIT can fully utilize the capacity of wireless networks, while maintaining good fairness and TCP friendliness. Both theoretical analysis and extensive experiments over hardware network emulator, Planetlab test bed as well as commercial 3G wireless networks are carried out to characterize and validate the performance of our proposed approach.

Dynamic FEC Algorithms for TFRC Flows

Media flows coexist with TCP-based data traffic on the Internet and are required to be TCP-friendly. The TCP protocol slowly increases its sending rate until episodes of congestion occur, and then it quickly reduces its rate to remove congestion. However, media flows can be sensitive to even brief episodes of congestion. In this paper, we are interested in protecting media flows from TCP-induced congestion while maintaining their TCP friendliness. In particular, we consider media flows carried over the TCP-Friendly Rate Control (TFRC) protocol and we design algorithms that dynamically adapt the level of forward error correction (FEC) based on the congestion state of the network. To this end, first, we investigate the loss and delay characteristics of TFRC flows in several TCP-induced congestion scenarios, and we develop novel predictors of loss events based on packet delay information. Second, we use these predictors to dynamically adapt the level of FEC protection based on the predicted level of congestion. We show that this technique can significantly improve the overhead versus reliability trade-off compared to fixed FEC. Third, we select the FEC and original media packets within each FEC block, in a rate-distortion optimized way, and we show that this technique significantly improves media quality.

Towards a Fairness Multimedia Transmission Using Layered-Based Multicast Protocol

The distribution of streaming multicast and real time audio/video applications in the Internet has been quickly increased in the Internet. Commonly, these applications rarely use congestion control and do not fairly share provided network capacity with TCP-based applications such as HTTP, FTP and emails. Therefore, Internet communities will be threatened by the increase of non-TCP-based applications that likely cause a significant increase of traffics congestion and starvation. This paper proposes a set of mechanisms, such as providing various data rates, background traffics, and various scenarios, to act friendly with TCP when sending multicast traffics. By using 8 scenarios of simulations, we use 6 layered multicast transmissions with background traffic Pareto with the shape factor 1.5 to evaluate performance metrics such as throughput, delay/latency, jitter, TCP friendliness, packet loss ratio, and convergence time. Our study shows that non TCP traffics behave fairly and respectful of the co-existent TCP-based applications that run on shared link transmissions even with background traffic. Another result shows that the simulation has low values on throughput, vary in jitter (0-10ms), and packet loss ratio > 3%. It was also difficult to reach convergence time quickly when involving only non TCP traffics.

Implementation of an energy-efficient scheduling scheme based on pipeline flux leak monitoring networks

Flow against pipeline leakage and the pipe network sudden burst pipe to pipeline leakage flow for the application objects, an energy-efficient real-time scheduling scheme is designed extensively used in pipeline leak monitoring. The proposed scheme can adaptively adjust the network rate in real-time and reduce the cell loss rate, so that it can efficiently avoid the traffic congestion. The recent evolution of wireless sensor networks has yielded a demand to improve energy-efficient scheduling algorithms and energy-efficient medium access protocols. This paper proposes an energy-efficient real-time scheduling scheme that reduces power consumption and network errors on pipeline flux leak monitoring networks. The proposed scheme is based on a dynamic modulation scaling scheme which can scale the number of bits per symbol and a switching scheme which can swap the polling schedule between channels. Built on top of EDF scheduling policy, the proposed scheme enhances the power performance without violating the constraints of real-time streams. The simulation results show that the proposed scheme enhances fault-tolerance and reduces power consumption. Furthermore, that Network congestion avoidance strategy with an energy-efficient real-time scheduling scheme can efficiently improve the bandwidth utilization, TCP friendliness and reduce the packet drop rate in pipeline flux leak monitoring networks.