Abstract not found

The goal of admission control is to support the quality-of-service demands of real-time applications via resource reservation. In this paper, we introduce a new approach to measurement-based admission control for multiclass networks with link sharing. We employ adaptive and measurement-based maximal rate envelopes of the aggregate traffic flow to provide a general and accurate traffic characterization that captures its temporal correlation as well as the available statistical multiplexing gain. In estimating applications' future performance, we introduce the notion of a schedulability confidence level which describes the uncertainty of the measurement-based "prediction" and reflects temporal variations in the measured envelope. We then devise techniques to control loss probability for a buffered multiplexer servicing heterogeneous and bursty traffic flows, even in the regime of a moderate number of traffic flows, which is important in link-sharing environments. Finally, we have developed an implementation of the scheme on a prototype router and performed a testbed measurement study, which together with extensive trace-driven simulations illustrates the effectiveness of the approach in practical scenarios.

The efficient distribution of stored information has become a major concern in the Internet which has increasingly become a vehicle for the transport of stored video. Because of the highly heterogeneous access to the Internet, researchers and engineers have argued for layered encoded video. In this paper we investigate delivering layered encoded video using caches. Based on the stochastic knapsack theory we develop a model for the layered video caching problem. We propose heuristics to determine which videos and which layers in the videos should be cached in order to maximize the revenue from the streaming service. We evaluate the performance of our heuristics through extensive numerical experiments. We find that for typical scenarios, the revenue increases nearly logarithmically with the cache size and linearly with the link bandwidth that connects the cache to the origin servers. We also consider service models with request queuing and negotiations about the delivered stream quality and find that both extensions provide only small revenue increases.

Network services for the most demanding advanced networked applications which require absolute, per-flow service assurances can be deterministic or statistical. By exploiting statistical properties of traffic, statistical assurances can extract more capacity from a network than deterministic assurances. In this work we consider statistical service assurances for traffic scheduling algorithms. We present functions, so-called effective envelopes, which are, with high certainty, upper bounds of multiplexed traffic. Effective envelopes can be used to obtain bounds on the amount of traffic on a link that can be provisioned with statistical service assurances. We show that our bounds can be applied to a variety of packet scheduling algorithms. In fact, one can reuse existing admission control functions for scheduling algorithms with deterministic assurances. We present numerical examples which compare the number of ows with statistical assurances that can be admitted with our effective envelope approach to those achieved with existing methods.

Networks that support multiple services through "link-sharing" must address the fundamental conflicting requirement between isolation among service classes to satisfy each class' quality of service requirements, and statistical sharing of resources for efficient network utilization. While a number of service disciplines have been devised which provide mechanisms to both isolate flows and fairly share excess capacity, admission control algorithms are needed which exploit the effects of inter-class resource sharing. In this paper, we develop a framework of using statistical service envelopes to study inter-class statistical resource sharing. We show how this service envelope enables a class to over-book resources beyond its deterministically guaranteed capacity by statistically characterizing the excess service available due to fluctuating demands of other service classes. We apply our techniques to several multi-class schedulers, including Generalized Processor Sharing, and des...

Provisioning multiple service classes with different performance characteristics (e.g., throughput and delay) is an important challenge for future packet networks. However, in large-scale networks, individually managing each traffic flow on each of its traversed routers has fundamental scalability limitations, in both the control plane's requirements for signaling, state management, and admission control, and the data plane's requirements for per-flow scheduling mechanisms. In this paper, we develop a scalable technique for quality-of-service management termed egress admission control. In our approach, resource management and admission control are performed only at egress routers, without any coordination among backbone nodes or per-flow management. Our key technique is to develop a framework for admission control under a general "black box" model, which allows for cross traffic that cannot be directly measured, and scheduling policies that may be ill-described across many network nod...

Allocating resources for multimedia traffic flows with real-time performance requirements is an important challenge for future packet networks. However, in large-scale networks, individually managing each traffic flow on each of its traversed routers has fundamental scalability limitations, in both the control plane's requirements for signaling, state management, and admission control, and the data plane's requirements for per-flow scheduling mechanisms. In this paper, we develop a scalable architecture and algorithm for quality-of-service management termed egress admission control. In our approach, resource management and admission control are performed only at egress routers, without any coordination among backbone nodes or per-flow management. Our key technique is to develop a framework for admission control under a general "black box" model, which allows for cross traffic that cannot be directly measured, and scheduling policies that may be ill-described across many network nodes. By monitoring and controlling egress routers' class-based arrival and service envelopes, we show how network services can be provisioned via scalable control at the network edge. We illustrate the performance of our approach with a set of simulation experiments using highly bursty traffic flows and find that despite our use of distributed admission control, our approach is able to accurately control the system's admissible region under a wide range of conditions.

As IP technologies providing both tremendous capacity and the ability to establish dynamic secure associations between endpoints emerge, Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) are going through dramatic growth. The number of endpoints per VPN is growing and the communication pattern between endpoints is becoming increasingly hard to forecast. Consequently, users are demanding dependable, dynamic connectivity between endpoints, with the network expected to accommodate any traffic matrix, as long as the traffic to the endpoints does not overwhelm the rates of the respective ingress and egress links. We propose a new service interface, termed a hose, to provide the appropriate performance abstraction. A hose is characterized by the aggregate traffic to and from one endpoint in the VPN to the set of other endpoints in the VPN, and by an associated performance guarantee. Hoses provide important advantages to a VPN customer: (i) flexibility to send traffic to a set of endpoints without having to s...

We study caching strategies for proxies that cache VBR encoded continuous media objects for highly interactive streaming applications. First, we develop a model for streaming VBR encoded continuous media objects. This model forms the basis for a stream admission control crite- rion and our study of caching strategies. We find that unlike conventional web caches, proxy caches for continuous media objects need to replicate or stripe objects to achieve high hit rates. We develop novel caching strategies that either implicitly or explicitly track the request pattern and cache (and replicate) objects accordingly. Our numerical results indicate that our caching strategies achieve significantly higher hit rates than caching without object repli- cation.

Two recent advances have resulted in significant improvements in web server quality-of-service. First, both centralized and distributed web servers can provide isolation among service classes by fairly distributing system resources. Second, session admission control can protect classes from performance degradation due to overload. The goal of this work is to design a general "front-end" algorithm that uses these two building blocks to support a new web service model, namely, multiclass services which control response latencies to within pre-specified targets. Our key technique is to devise a general service abstraction to adaptively control not only the latency of a particular class, but also to assess the inter-class relationships. In this way, we capture the extent to which classes are isolated or share system resources (as determined by the server architecture and system internals) and hence their effects on each other's QoS. For example, if the server provides class isolation (i.e....