A Distributed Routing Method for Dynamic Multicasting

Single point, sender based control does not scale well for multicast delivery. For applications, such as group video or teleconferencing a low total cost multicast tree is required. In this article we present a destination driven algorithm to minimize the total tree cost of multicast tree in a dynamic situation for the whole session duration. In this heuristic approach we considered the staying duration of participants are available at the time of joining. The performance of our algorithm is analyzed through extensive simulation and evaluated against several other existing dynamic multicast routing and also against one well known near optimum heuristic algorithm used for solving Steiner tree problem. We have further tested our algorithm using erroneous information given by the joining participants. Simulation results show that its performance does not degrade that much even when the range of error is considerably high, which proves the robustness of our algorithm.     

An engineering approach to dynamic prediction of network performance from application logs

Network measurement traces contain information regarding network behavior over the period of observation. Research carried out from different contexts shows predictions of network behavior can be made depending on network past history. Existing works on network performance prediction use a complicated stochastic modeling approach that extrapolates past data to yield a rough estimate of long‐term future network performance. However, prediction of network performance in the immediate future is still an unresolved problem. In this paper, we address network performance prediction as an engineering problem. The main contribution of this paper is to predict network performance dynamically for the immediate future. Our proposal also considers the practical implication of prediction. Therefore, instead of following the conventional approach to predict one single value, we predict a range within which network performance may lie. This range is bounded by our two newly proposed indices, namely, Optimistic Network Performance Index (ONPI) and Robust Network Performance Index (RNPI). Experiments carried out using one‐year‐long traffic traces between several pairs of real‐life networks validate the usefulness of our model. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Ensuring fairness among ECN and non‐ECN TCP over the Internet

Explicit Congestion Notification (ECN) has been proved to provide a fast indication of incipient congestion and thus better the performance of a TCP/IP network. In this work, we carry out investigations on gateway or router performance in providing fairnesss when both FIM ECN‐capable and non‐ECN‐capable connections are employed. We propose a new packet‐dropping scheme called Fair In‐time Dropping (FID) which drops packets from a connection upon detecting an incipient indication of congestion depending on its share of gateway or router buffer occupancy. We also show that a combination of FIM and FID offers the best fairness compared with a combination of FIM along with other dropping schemes. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

A new approach to ensure fairness over the Internet

Congestion signaling is an essential issue for ensuring a high network performance. Explicit congestion notification (ECN) has been proved to provide a faster indication of congestion and thus improve the QoS of a TCP/IP network. In this paper, we present a new scheme for ECN named fair in‐time marking (FIM), which employs a mechanism that as well as providing an indication of incipient congestion, assures a fair service to all the connections. To facilitate such services using FIM, we propose inclusion of some simple yet effective functionalities in the routers. This is important as the client base of the Internet is increasing rapidly and the demand for a reasonably fair service is getting stronger. Experiments show that FIM offers the best fairness, sometimes better by around 20% or more without affecting efficiency, compared with other proposed schemes for ECN. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.