Unicast Path Research Articles

Incrementally improving lookup latency in distributed hash table systems

Distributed hash table (DHT) systems are an important class of peer-to-peer routing infrastructures. They enable scalable wide-area storage and retrieval of information, and will support the rapid development of a wide variety of Internet-scale applications ranging from naming systems and file systems to application-layer multicast. DHT systems essentially build an overlay network, but a path on the overlay between any two nodes can be significantly different from the unicast path between those two nodes on the underlying network. As such, the lookup latency in these systems can be quite high and can adversely impact the performance of applications built on top of such systems.In this paper, we discuss a random sampling technique that incrementally improves lookup latency in DHT systems. Our sampling can be implemented using information gleaned from lookups traversing the overlay network. For this reason, we call our approach lookup-parasitic random sampling (LPRS). LPRS is fast, incurs little network overhead, and requires relatively few modifications to existing DHT systems.For idealized versions of DHT systems like Chord, Tapestry and Pastry, we analytically prove that LPRS can result in lookup latencies proportional to the average unicast latency of the network, provided the underlying physical topology has a power-law latency expansion. We then validate this analysis by implementing LPRS in the Chord simulator. Our simulations reveal that LPRS-Chord exhibits a qualitatively better latency scaling behavior relative to unmodified Chord.Finally, we provide evidence which suggests that the Internet router-level topology resembles power-law latency expansion. This finding implies that LPRS has significant practical applicability as a general latency reduction technique for many DHT systems. This finding is also of independent interest since it might inform the design of latency-sensitive topology models for the Internet.

Energy-efficient routing for connection-oriented traffic in wireless ad-hoc networks

We address the problem of routing connection-oriented traffic in wireless ad-hoc networks with energy efficiency. We outline the trade-offs that arise by the flexibility of wireless nodes to transmit at different power levels and define a framework for formulating the problem of session routing from the perspective of energy expenditure. A set of heuristics are developed for determining end-to-end unicast paths with sufficient bandwidth and transceiver resources, in which nodes use local information in order to select their transmission power and bandwidth allocation. We propose a set of metrics that associate each link transmission with a cost and consider both the cases of plentiful and limited bandwidth resources, the latter jointly with a set of channel allocation algorithms. Performance is measured through call blocking probability and average energy consumption and our detailed simulation model is used to evaluate the algorithms for a variety of networks.

Optimal partition of QoS requirements on unicast paths and multicast trees

We investigate the problem of optimal resource allocation for end-to-end QoS requirements on unicast paths and multicast trees. Specifically, we consider a framework in which resource allocation is based on local QoS requirements at each network link, and associated with each link is a cost function that increases with the severity of the QoS requirement. Accordingly, the problem that we address is how to partition an end-to-end QoS requirement into local requirements, such that the overall cost is minimized. We establish efficient (polynomial) solutions for both unicast and multicast connections. These results provide the required foundations for the corresponding QoS routing schemes, which identify either paths or trees that lead to minimal overall cost. In addition, we show that our framework provides better tools for coping with other fundamental multicast problems, such as dynamic tree maintenance.

LE-SBCC: Loss-Event Oriented Source-Based Multicast Congestion Control

Congestion control is an important building block of a Quality of Service (QoS) system for multicast-based multimedia services and applications on the World Wide Web. We propose an end-to-end single-rate source-based multicast congestion control scheme (LE-SBCC) for reliable or unreliable multicast transport protocols. It addresses all the pieces of the single-rate multicast congestion control problem including drop-to-zero issues, TCP friendliness and RTT estimation. The scheme design consists of a cascaded set of filters and a rate-based additive-increase multiplicative-decrease (AIMD) module. These filters together transform the multicast tree to appear like a unicast path for the purposes of congestion control. Unlike TCP, the scheme is not self-clocked but acts upon a stream of loss indications (LIs) from receivers. These LIs are filtered to get a stream of loss events (LEs) (S. Floyd et al., in SIGCOMM 2000, Aug. 2000) (at most one per RTT per receiver). This LE stream is further filtered to extract the maximum LEs from any one receiver. Then the scheme effects at most one rate-reduction per round trip time (RTT). A range of results (simulation and experimental) is presented and compared against the mathematical model of the scheme components. Furthermore, we have successfully adapted TFRC (Op. cit) to our scheme, which is important to multimedia services desiring relatively stable rates over short time scales.

Architectural support for efficient multicasting in irregular networks

Parallel computing on networks of workstations is fast becoming a cost-effective high-performance computing alternative to MPPs. Such a computing environment typically consists of processing nodes interconnected through a switch-based irregular network. Many of the problems that were solved for regular networks have to be solved anew for these systems. One such problem is that of efficient multicast communication. In this paper, we propose two broad categories of schemes for efficient multicasting in such irregular networks: network interface-based (NI-based) and switch-based. The NI-based multicasting schemes use the network interface of intermediate destinations for absorbing and retransmitting messages to other destinations in the multicast tree. In contrast, the switch-based multicasting schemes use hardware support for packet replication at the switches of the network and a concept known as multidestination routing to convey a multicast message from one source to multiple destinations. We first present alternative schemes for efficient multipacket forwarding at the NI and derive an optimal k-binomial multicast tree for multipacket NI-based multicast. We then propose two switch-based multicasting schemes that differ in the power of the encoding scheme and the complexity of the decoding logic at the switches. These multicasting schemes use path-based multidestination worms that can cover all nodes connected to switches along a valid unicast path and tree-based multidestination worms that can cover entire destination sets in a single phase using one worm, respectively. For each scheme, we describe the associated header encoding and decoding operation, the method for deriving multidestination worms that cover arbitrary multicast destination sets, and the multicasting scheme using the derived multidestination worms.

Strategies and Algorithms for Routing both Unicast and Multicast Paths in WDM Networks

This paper introduces the concept of the multicast optical path in WDM networks, and treats the strategies and the algorithms, which allow the routing of plural multicast paths together with unicast paths. This analysis was motivated by the possibility of exploit the optical layer facilities in the transport network, to carry distributive services, such as video channels (e.g. CATV), without the need of dedicated transmission networks. The strategies and algorithms reported in this paper arise from a generalisation of those ones, which have been previously reported in literature. They are wavelength path (WP: which does not make use of wavelength conversion), virtual wavelength path (VWP: which make full use of wavelength conversion), and partial virtual wavelength path (PVWP: making a parsimonious use of wavelength conversion). The analysis shows the characteristics and performance of those strategies and algorithms considering, as a figure of merit, either the number of wavelengths or the system scale (dimensions of the optical nodes), and compare one to each other in order to point out advantages and disadvantages. The main result is that multicast optical paths can favourably be accommodated in a WDM network, and the strategy we propose, making a parsimonious use of wavelength conversion, allows the lowest system scale to be obtained with a very low number of wavelength converters.

Restricted dynamic Steiner trees for scalable multicast in datagram networks

The paper addresses the issue of minimizing the number of nodes involved in routing over a multicast tree and in the maintenance of such a tree in a datagram network. It presents a scheme where the tree routing and maintenance burden is laid only upon the source node and the destination nodes associated with the multicast tree. The main concept behind this scheme is to view each multicast tree as a collection of unicast paths and to locate only the multicast source and destination nodes on the junctions of their multicast tree. The paper shows that despite this restriction, the cost of the created multicast trees is not necessarily higher than the cost of the trees created by other algorithms that do not impose the restriction and therefore require all nodes along the data path of a tree to participate in routing over the tree and in the maintenance of the tree.