Traffic Balancing Research Articles

Efficient resource provisioning using traffic balancing in multidomain optical networks

SummaryIn multidomain optical networks (MDONs) the emerging multimedia, multivendor applications–based scheduled traffic (ST) is periodic and repeated day by day. The traffic is heavy during the working hours and slack during the non‐office hours. This results in the scarcity of network resources during the working hours, leading to the increased blocking of requests, even though there remains relatively large underused capacity during the non‐office hours. To use the network resources uniformly and efficiently, the demands may be slided within or shifted along the time zones/windows. In this paper, we first propose a heuristic algorithm, time‐aware routing and wavelength assignment (TA‐RWA), which allocates resources without traffic balancing (TB) for the ST in MDON. Time‐aware routing and wavelength assignment policy is then used as a benchmark for comparison with the 3 different TB solutions (named as P1‐TB, P2‐TB, and P3‐TB), in which the network load is redistributed by rescheduling the intradomain and interdomain demands. We performed extensive simulation experiments in MATLAB environment and compared the proposed policies with the existing ordering policies. From the results, it can be inferred that the proposed TB policies outperform the TA‐RWA, and the existing strategies of the blocking probability, resource utilization ratio (RUR), and percentage of intradomain and interdomain connections established. The best performance is achieved using P3‐TB strategy, in which requests are slided within, and shifted, along different time windows. The strategy shows about 70% reduction in the percentage blocking probability with respect to the TA‐RWA and the existing strategies.

Implementation of Server Handover for Live Streaming Application during High Traffic with Bitrate Adaptation

As the rate of internet users is increasing on a daily basis, a tremendous amount of these users are accessing online streaming websites and applications. This paper proposes a live streaming architecture that supports traffic balancing during peak times and bitrate adaptation. Rather than replicating content on multiple servers, we implemented traffic balancing by assigning a temporary regional server to manage the traffic at regional area. Bitrate adaptation at server side was also proposed and implemented to provide a fair video quality to all users. Through a few tests that has been run on the testbed, we can see the live video streaming was move seamlessly from one server to another server with an acceptable video quality among the users.

Traffic balancing over licensed and unlicensed bands in heterogeneous networks

Traffic balancing over licensed and unlicensed bands in heterogeneous networks

Load Balancing With 3-D Beamforming in Macro-Assisted Small Cell Architecture

Small cell is an attractive and promising technology for improving capacity in traffic hotspots using cell densification. We consider the traffic load-balancing problem for a macro-assisted small cell architecture exploiting the flexible 3-D beamforming facilitated by the adoption of the active antenna system at base stations. Specifically, 3-D user equipment (UE)-specific beamforming is utilized for traffic load balancing due to its unique feature that the received signal is maximized, while the interference is limited with narrower beamwidth. We propose a novel traffic load-balancing algorithm based on cell association and cell sectorization using 3-D UE-specific beamforming, and the performance of the proposed algorithm is evaluated via system-level simulations. Results show that cell edge user throughput and cell average throughput both improve significantly with the proposed load-balancing algorithm compared with the conventional sectorization with fixed antenna down-tilt scheme. In addition, in denser small cell scenarios, our proposed scheme can further increase the load-balancing gain with reduced cell planning efforts compared with the conventional scheme.

A transparent and scalable anomaly-based DoS detection method

Intrusions and intrusive behaviour can be aimed at different parts of the system, ranging from lower-level network attacks intended to disrupt the flow of data in general, to higher-level attacks targeted against specific applications or services. Due to the constant growth of network traffic and the need to inspect the traffic thoroughly, intrusion detection and prevention are becoming increasingly complex and require significant computational resources. This paper presents a distributed, scalable solution for the detection of lower-level Denial-of-Service (DoS) attacks which are executed by transmitting overwhelming amounts of data with the intention of disrupting regular network service. Scalability is achieved by active traffic balancing among multiple traffic processors, exploiting the flexibility and network programmability that Software Defined Networking paradigm brings and packet processing based on device polling. Traffic processors can be elastically added into the pool depending on the traffic volume. The whole system is completely transparent to the external observers. The paper shows that the implemented balancing algorithm further improves the reliability of the intrusion detection.

Study on the improvements for Managerial Efficiency of the Designated Lane Law

Lane Designation is defined as reasonable road management to ensure the road safety and enhance road efficiency. While the lane designation system was abolished in 1999, it was redefined because of the increasing number of large vehicles in the passing lane, violent on driving and traffic accidents in 2000. The needs of improvement on operating the lane designation has been increasing more in recent due to the low ratio of compliance with the system and difficulties to keep the right lane due to need of turning and demand of widening of designates lane for two-wheeled vehicles and truck. In this study, we presented the improvement plan through the question survey, simulation analysis, safety evaluation. It found a problem that the low-speed vehicle is to use the upper level roadway, difficulties of supervision, the imbalance in the lane use, imbalance traffic and does not match the international standards. This study suggested five different alternatives through the survey. micro simulation has used in order to examine each alternative by management effectiveness and feasibility. It analyzed the traffic speed, efficiency, traffic balance of alternatives. Also, safety evaluation conducted in terms of the range of field-of-view to ensure the easiness of field of view by various configurational difference between the vehicles. By the analysis results of such indicators, This study presents proposals for improvement in operating designated lane that low-speed-big-sized vehicles keep to the right lane, and high-speed-small sized vehicles keep to the left lane.

SoftWater: Software-defined networking for next-generation underwater communication systems

Underwater communication systems have drawn the attention of the research community in the last 15 years. This growing interest can largely be attributed to new civil and military applications enabled by large-scale networks of underwater devices (e.g., underwater static sensors, unmanned autonomous vehicles (AUVs), and autonomous robots), which can retrieve information from the aquatic and marine environment, perform in-network processing on the extracted data, and transmit the collected information to remote locations. Currently underwater communication systems are inherently hardware-based and rely on closed and inflexible architectural design. This imposes significant challenges into adopting new underwater communication and networking technologies, prevent the provision of truly-differentiated services to highly diverse underwater applications, and induce great barriers to integrate heterogeneous underwater devices. Software-defined networking (SDN), recognized as the next-generation networking paradigm, relies on the highly flexible, programmable, and virtualizable network architecture to dramatically improve network resource utilization, simplify network management, reduce operating cost, and promote innovation and evolution. In this paper, a software-defined architecture, namely SoftWater, is first introduced to facilitate the development of the next-generation underwater communication systems. More specifically, by exploiting the network function virtualization (NFV) and network virtualization concepts, SoftWater architecture can easily incorporate new underwater communication solutions, accordingly maximize the network capacity, can achieve the network robustness and energy efficiency, as well as can provide truly differentiated and scalable networking services. Consequently, the SoftWater architecture can simultaneously support a variety of different underwater applications, and can enable the interoperability of underwater devices from different manufacturers that operate on different underwater communication technologies based on acoustic, optical, or radio waves. Moreover, the essential network management tools of SoftWater are discussed, including reconfigurable multi-controller placement, hybrid in-band and out-of-band control traffic balancing, and utility-optimal network virtualization. Furthermore, the major benefits of SoftWater architecture are demonstrated by introducing software-defined underwater networking solutions, including the throughput-optimal underwater routing, SDN-enhanced fault recovery, and software-defined underwater mobility management. The research challenges to realize the SoftWater are also discussed in detail.

A network-assisted flow mobility architecture for optimized mobile medical multimedia transmission

A large part of mobile Health (mHealth) use-cases such as remote patient monitoring/diagnosis, teleconsultation, and guided surgical intervention requires advanced and reliable mobile communication solutions to provide efficient multimedia transmission with strict medical level Quality of Service (QoS) and Quality of Experience (QoE) provision. The increasing deployment of overlapping wireless access networks enables the possibility to offer the required network resources for ubiquitous and pervasive mHealth services. To address the challenges and support the above use-cases in today’s heterogeneous network (HetNet) environments, we propose a network-assisted flow-based mobility management architecture for optimized real-time mobile medical multimedia communication. The proposed system is empirically evaluated in a Pan-European HetNet testbed with multi-access Android-based mobile devices. We observed that the proposed scheme significantly improves the objective QoE of simultaneous real-time high-resolution electrocardiography and high-definition ultrasound transmissions while also enhances traffic load balancing capabilities of wireless architectures.

Fault-Aware Load-Balancing Routing for 2D-Mesh and Torus On-Chip Network Topologies

Routing algorithm design for on-chip networks (OCNs) has become increasingly challenging due to high levels of integration and complexity of modern systems-on-chip (SoCs). The inherent unreliability of components, embedded oversized IP blocks, and fine-grained voltage-frequency islands (VFIs) management among others, raise several challenges in OCNs: (a) network topologies become irregular or asymmetric making circular route dependencies that lead to deadlock hard to detect; and (b) routing algorithms that lack strong load-balancing properties often saturate prematurely. In order to address the aforementioned deadlock and load-balancing problems, we propose the traffic balancing oblivious routing (TBOR) algorithm. It is a two-phase routing algorithm consisting of: (1) construction of the weighted acyclic channel dependency graph (CDG) for the OCN to efficiently maximize available resource utilization; and (2) channel ordering across turn models to keep the underlying CDG cycle-free to guarantee deadlock-freedom using one or more turn-models. Channel bandwidth utilization and traffic balancing are achieved through static virtual channel allocation according to residual bandwidth of healthy links. In addition, we introduce in this work two schemes of different granularity of fault detection and analysis while guaranteeing in-order packet delivery by assigning a unique path to each flow. Extensive experiments demonstrate the proposed routing methodology outperforms previous algorithms.

Congestion-aware and traffic load balancing scheme for routing in WSNs

Congestion in a Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) is one of the causes of performance degradation due to severe packet loss that leads to excessive energy consumption. Solutions in WSNs try to avoid and overcome congestion by selecting sensor nodes with sufficient buffer space and adjusting the traffic rate at the source node over the shortest discovered route that usually decreases the End-to-End (ETE) throughput. On-demand routing protocols have the potential to discover the least congested route when it is required. In a WSN, most of the on-demand routing protocols replace the routing metric of the prevalent routing protocol with their proposed routing metric and keep the route discovery mechanism intact, which is not sufficient to increase the performance of the WSN. To address these problems, a novel Congestion-aware and Traffic Load balancing Scheme (CTLS) for routing has been proposed. The CTLS proactively avoids congestion through a novel route discovery mechanism to select the optimum node based on a composite metric. If congestion occurs, CTLS tries to detect it in a timely manner and alleviates it reactively using a novel ripple-based search approach. The simulation results show that the CTLS performs better as compared to the congestion avoidance, detection and alleviation and no congestion control schemes in terms of packet delivery ratio, ETE delay, throughput, and energy consumption per data packet in a resource constraint wireless network.

Review of Adaptive Cell Selection Techniques in LTE-Advanced Heterogeneous Networks

Poor cell selection is the main challenge in Picocell (PeNB) deployment in Long Term Evolution- (LTE-) Advanced heterogeneous networks (HetNets) because it results in load imbalance and intercell interference. A selection technique based on cell range extension (CRE) has been proposed for LTE-Advanced HetNets to extend the coverage of PeNBs for load balancing. However, poor CRE bias setting in cell selection inhibits the attainment of desired cell splitting gains. By contrast, a cell selection technique based on adaptive bias is a more effective solution to traffic load balancing in terms of increasing data rate compared with static bias-based approaches. This paper reviews the use of adaptive cell selection in LTE-Advanced HetNets by highlighting the importance of cell load estimation. The general performances of different techniques for adaptive CRE-based cell selection are compared. Results reveal that the adaptive CRE bias of the resource block utilization ratio (RBUR) technique exhibits the highest cell-edge throughput. Moreover, more accurate cell load estimation is obtained in the extended RBUR adaptive CRE bias technique through constant bit rate (CBR) traffic, which further improved load balancing as against the estimation based on the number of user equipment (UE). Finally, this paper presents suggestions for future research directions.

Outer Synchronization between Two Coupled Complex Networks and Its Application in Public Traffic Supernetwork

The paper presents a new urban public traffic supernetwork model by using the existing bus network modeling method, consisting of the conventional bus traffic network and the urban rail traffic network. We investigate the synchronization problem of urban public traffic supernetwork model by using the coupled complex network’s outer synchronization theory. Analytical and numerical simulations are given to illustrate the impact of traffic dispatching frequency and traffic lines optimization to the urban public traffic supernetwork balance.

An entropy-based clustering algorithm for load balancing in WSN

Energy efficiency and traffic load balancing are the important factors for wireless sensor network WSN designer. To achieve the efficient energy consumption and well-distributed load balancing, the clustering techniques can be an efficient solution. Furthermore, the several applications like real-time surveillance require the guaranteed delay in order to satisfy their delay requirements. The guaranteed delay can be one of the critical design issues for these WSN applications as well. In this paper, we propose a novel clustering algorithm to solve the energy and delay issues in WSN. Our algorithm uses an entropy-based cluster cost function, which takes into account the traffic load and the traffic variation. The simulation results show that our algorithm has longer lifetime and lower delay than low-energy adaptive clustering hierarchy LEACH and hybrid energy-efficient distributed clustering HEED.

Small-Cell Traffic Balancing Over Licensed and Unlicensed Bands

The Third-Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) has recently started standardizing the “licensed-assisted access using LTE” for small cells, which is referred to as dual-band femtocell (DBF) in this paper, which uses the Long-Term Evolution (LTE) air interface in both the licensed and unlicensed bands based on the LTE carrier aggregation feature. Alternatively, the Small Cell Forum introduced the integrated femto-WiFi (IFW) small cell, which simultaneously accesses both the licensed band (via cellular interface) and the unlicensed band (via WiFi interface). In this paper, a practical algorithm for IFW and DBF to automatically balance their traffic in licensed and unlicensed bands, based on the real-time channel, interference, and traffic conditions of both bands, is described. The algorithm considers the fact that some “smart” devices (sDevices) have both cellular and WiFi radios, while some WiFi-only devices (wDevices) may only have WiFi radio. In addition, the algorithm considers a realistic scenario where a single small-cell user may simultaneously use multiple sDevices and wDevices via either the IFW or the DBF in conjunction with a wireless local area network. The goal is to maximize the total user satisfaction/utility of the small-cell user, while keeping the interference from small cells to macrocells below predefined thresholds. The algorithm can be implemented at the radio link control or the network layer of the IFW and DBF small-cell base stations. Results demonstrate that the proposed traffic-balancing algorithm applied to either IFW or DBF significantly increases the sum utility of all macrocell and small-cell users, compared with the current practices. Finally, various implementation issues of IFW and DBF are addressed.

QoE‐ and energy‐efficient resource optimization in OFDMA networks with bidirectional relaying

AbstractBecause of the surging demands of multimedia services, quality‐of‐experience (QoE) is becoming an important metric to evaluate network quality from users' perspective. In this paper, resource optimisation to achieve optimal tradeoff between QoE and energy consumption in bidirectional orthogonal frequency‐division multiple‐access relaying networks is addressed so as to provide satisfactory multimedia delivery quality and support green communications. We first formulate a QoE‐energy efficiency tradeoff optimisation where QoE requirements and relaying traffic balance are considered and prove that QoE‐energy efficiency is quasiconcave on QoE, which suggests the existence of a unique global optimal tradeoff point. We then propose an optimisation framework to achieve the optimal tradeoff efficiently. With the framework, we develop resource allocation approaches for two specific relaying strategies, that is, two‐phase decode‐and‐forward relaying with dynamic XOR network coding and compute‐and‐forward relaying with physical network coding via structured codes. Numerical results validate theoretical findings and demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed optimisation solution for achieving the tradeoff between QoE and energy consumption. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Control traffic balancing in software defined networks

To promise on-line and adaptive traffic engineering in software defined networks (SDNs), the control messages, e.g., the first packet of every new flow and network traffic statistics, should be forwarded from software defined switches to the controller(s) in a fast and robust manner. As many signaling events and control plane operations are required in SDNs, they could easily generate a significant amount of control traffic that must be addressed together with the data traffic. However, the usage of in-band control channel imposes a great challenge into timely and reliable transmissions of control traffic, while out-band control is usually cost-prohibitive. To counter this, in this paper, the control traffic balancing problem is first formulated as a nonlinear optimization framework with an objective to find the optimal control traffic forwarding paths for each switch in such a way the average control traffic delay in the whole network is minimized. This problem is extremely critical in SDNs because the timely delivery of control traffic initiated by Openflow switches directly impacts the effectiveness of the routing strategies. Specifically, the fundamental mathematical structures of the formulated nonlinear problem and solution set are provided and accordingly, an efficient algorithm, called polynomial-time approximation algorithm (PTAA), is proposed to yield the fast convergence to a near optimal solution by employing the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM). Furthermore, the optimal controller placement problem in in-band mode is examined, which aims to find the optimal switch location where the controller can be collocated by minimizing the control message delay. While it is not widely researched except quantitative or heuristic results, a simple and efficient algorithm is proposed to guarantee the optimum placement with regards of traffic statistics. Simulation results confirm that the proposed PTAA achieves considerable delay reduction, greatly facilitating controller’s traffic engineering in large-scale SDNs.

Cost-Effective Design of Mesh-of-Tree Interconnect for Multicore Clusters With 3-D Stacked L2 Scratchpad Memory

3-D integrated circuits (3-D ICs) offer a promising solution to overcome the scaling limitations of 2-D ICs. However, using too many through-silicon-vias (TSVs) pose a negative impact on 3-D ICs due to the large overhead of TSV (e.g., large footprint and low yield). In this paper, we propose a new TSV sharing method for a circuit-switched 3-D mesh-of-tree (MoT) interconnect, which supports high-throughput and low-latency communication between processing cores and 3-D stacked multibanked L2 scratchpad memory. The proposed method supports traffic balancing and TSV-failure tolerant routing. The proposed method advocates a modular design strategy to allow stacking multiple identical memory dies without the need for different masks for dies at different levels in the memory stack. We also investigate various parameters of 3-D memory stacking (e.g., fabrication technology, TSV bonding technique, number of memory tiers, and TSV sharing scheme) that affect interconnect latency, system performance, and fabrication cost. Compared to conventional MoT interconnect [6] that is straightforwardly adapted to 3-D integration, the proposed method yields up to $\times 2.11$ and $\times 1.11$ improvements in terms of cost efficiency (i.e., performance/cost) for microbump TSV bonding and direct Cu–Cu TSV bonding techniques, respectively.

The relation of traffic balance and network size: a case from the indian mobile industry

Do small telecom networks face an inherent disadvantage vis-a-vis large networks in the matter of interconnection? Does the net payout for interconnection decrease with an increase in the relative size of the network? While the assumption of a balanced calling pattern implies equal traffic flows across any two networks, the relation between network size and net payout for interconnection is an empirical question that depends on the customer profiles, pricing strategies, and calling patterns of different networks at a particular point in time, in a specific context. With the help of data on monthly intracircle, inter-operator traffic flows in India between a sample operator and all other operators, the paper presents a case study showing that a high relative subscriber balance is associated with high incoming call minutes. Company- and market-specific fixed effects account for the bulk of the explanatory power. There is some evidence that, ceteris paribus, an increase in unutilised capacity leads to an increase in the number of outgoing minutes, and in the net payout for interconnection.

A Cross-Layer QoS Design with Energy and Traffic Balance Aware for Different Types of Traffic in MANETs

Efficient quality of service (QoS) provisioning for mobile ad hoc networks is a challenging task, especially for different types of traffic. The IEEE 802.11e has provided QoS support through priority scheduling for different types of traffic at the media access layer (MAC). However, the 802.11e QoS mechanism has an impact on the higher layer, i.e., network layer and causes some new problems that need to be considered carefully, such as the path correlation between different data types which will result in much re-routing under heavy traffic load, especially when they share a common link. In this paper, we propose a cross layer design scheme for different types of traffic. In the MAC layer, we bundle the control packet and data packet. And in the network layer, we select the efficient path according to traffic balance and energy consumption of nodes for different types of traffic. If the different types of traffic have common links, we exploit virtual circuit to avoid path correlation. Hence, our scheme can provide better QoS for different types of traffic. Our simulations also demonstrate that the proposed scheme can achieve better performance compared to the existing routing schemes.

SoftAir: A software defined networking architecture for 5G wireless systems

One of the main building blocks and major challenges for 5G cellular systems is the design of flexible network architectures which can be realized by the software defined networking paradigm. Existing commercial cellular systems rely on closed and inflexible hardware-based architectures both at the radio frontend and in the core network. These problems significantly delay the adoption and deployment of new standards, impose significant challenges in implementing and innovation of new techniques to maximize the network capacity and accordingly the coverage, and prevent provisioning of truly- differentiated services which are able to adapt to growing and uneven and highly variable traffic patterns. In this paper, a new software-defined architecture, called SoftAir, for next generation (5G) wireless systems, is introduced. Specifically, the novel ideas of network function cloudification and network virtualization are exploited to provide a scalable, flexible and resilient network architecture. Moreover, the essential enabling technologies to support and manage the proposed architecture are discussed in details, including fine-grained base station decomposition, seamless incorporation of Openflow, mobility- aware control traffic balancing, resource-efficient network virtualization, and distributed and collaborative traffic classification. Furthermore, the major benefits of SoftAir architecture with its enabling technologies are showcased by introducing software- defined traffic engineering solutions. The challenging issues for realizing SoftAir are also discussed in details.