Henrik Abrahamsson

Program popularity and viewer behaviour in a large TV-on-demand system

Today increasingly large volumes of TV and video are distributed over IP-networks and over the Internet. It is therefore essential for traffic and cache management to understand TV program popularity and access patterns in real networks. In this paper we study access patterns in a large TV-on-Demand system over four months. We study user behaviour and program popularity and its impact on caching. The demand varies a lot in daily and weekly cycles. There are large peaks in demand, especially on Friday and Saturday evenings, that need to be handled. We see that the cacheability, the share of requests that are not first-time requests, is very high. Furthermore, there is a small set of programs that account for a large fraction of the requests. We also find that the share of requests for the top most popular programs grows during prime time, and the change rate among them decreases. This is important for caching. The cache hit ratio increases during prime time when the demand is the highest, and aching makes the biggest difference when it matters most. We also study the popularity (in terms of number of requests and rank) of individual programs and how that changes over time. Also, we see that the type of programs offered determines what the access pattern will look like.

A multi-path routing algorithm for IP networks based on flow optimisation

Intra-domain routing in the Internet normally uses a single shortest path to forward packets towards a specific destination with no knowledge of traffic demand. We present an intra-domain routing algorithm based on multi-commodity flow optimisation which enable load sensitive forwarding over multiple paths. It is neither constrained by weight-tuning of legacy routing protocols, such as OSPF, nor requires a totally new forwarding mechanism, such as MPLS. These characteristics are accomplished by aggregating the traffic flows destined for the same egress into one commodity in the optimisation and using a hash based forwarding mechanism. The aggregation also results in a reduction of computational complexity which makes the algorithm feasible for on-line load balancing. Another contribution is the optimisation objective function which allows precise tuning of the tradeoff between load balancing and total network efficiency.

Ambient Networks Management Challenges and Approaches

System management addresses the provision of functions required for controlling, planning, allocating, monitoring, and deploying the resources of a network and of its services in order to optimize its efficiency and productivity and to safeguard its operation. It is also an enabler for the creation and sustenance of new business models and value chains, reflecting the different roles the service providers and users of a network can assume. Ambient Network represents a new networking approach and it aims to enable the cooperation of heterogeneous networks, on demand and transparently, to the potential users, without the need for pre-configuration or offline negotiation between network operators. To achieve these goals, ambient network management systems have to become dynamic, adaptive, autonomic and responsive to the network and its ambience. This paper discusses relationships between the concepts of autonomous and self-manageability and those of ambient networking, and the challenges and benefits that arise from their employment.

Using empirical distributions to characterize Web client traffic and to generate synthetic traffic

We model a Web client using empirical probability distributions for user clicks and transferred data sizes. By using a heuristic threshold value to distinguish user clicks in a packet trace we get a simple method for analyzing large packet traces in order to get information about user off times and amount of data transferred due to a user click. We derive the empirical probability distributions from the analysis of the packet trace. The heuristic is not perfect, but we believe it is good enough to produce a useful Web client model. We use the empirical model to implement a Web client traffic generator. The characteristics of the generated traffic is very close to the original packet trace, including self-similar properties.

Towards ambient networks management

Ambient Networks (AN) are under development and they are based on novel networking concepts and systems that will enable a wide range of user and business communication scenarios beyond todays fixed, 3rd generation mobile and IP standards. Central to this project is the concept of Ambient Control Space (ACS) and the Domain Manager control function, which manages the underlying data transfer capabilities and presents a set of interfaces towards the supported services and applications. Network Management Systems of Ambient Networks must work in an environment where heterogeneous networks compose and cooperate, on demand and transparently, without the need for manual (pre or re)-configuration or offline negotiations between network operators. To achieve these goals, ambient network management systems must become dynamic, distributed, self-managing and responsive to the network and its ambience. This paper describes the different management research challenges and four complementary solution approaches (i.e. Pattern-based Management, Peer-to-Peer Management, (Un)PnP Management, Traffic Engineering Management Application Approaches) that enable efficient management of ambient networks, and the relationships between them, and presents the main results achieved so far.

Resource management in radio access and IP-based core networks for IMT Advanced and Beyond

The increased capacity needs, primarily driven by content distribution, and the vision of Internet-of-Things with billions of connected devices pose radically new demands on future wireless and mobile systems. In general the increased diversity and scale result in complex resource management and optimization problems in both radio access networks and the wired core network infrastructure. We summarize results in this area from a collaborative Sino-Swedish project within IMT Advanced and Beyond, covering adaptive radio resource management, energy-aware routing, OpenFlow-based network virtualization, data center networking, and access network caching for TV on demand.

Design and implementation of the Node Identity Internetworking Architecture

The Internet Protocol (IP) has been proven very flexible, being able to accommodate all kinds of link technologies and supporting a broad range of applications. The basic principles of the original Internet architecture include end-to-end addressing, global routeability and a single namespace of IP addresses that unintentionally serves both as locators and host identifiers. The commercial success and widespread use of the Internet have lead to new requirements, which include Internetworking over business boundaries, mobility and multi-homing in an untrusted environment. Our approach to satisfy these new requirements is to introduce a new Internetworking layer, the node identity layer. Such a layer runs on top of the different versions of IP, but could also run directly on top of other kinds of network technologies, such as MPLS and 2G/3G PDP contexts. This approach enables connectivity across different communication technologies, supports mobility, multi-homing, and security from ground up. This paper describes the Node Identity Architecture in detail and discusses the experiences from implementing and running a prototype.

Performance of traffic engineering in operational IP networks – an experimental study

Today, the main alternative for intra-domain traffic engineering in IP networks is to use different methods for setting the weights (and so decide upon the shortest-paths) in the routing protocols OSPF and IS-IS. In this paper we study how traffic engineering perform in real networks. We analyse different weight-setting methods and compare performance with the optimal solution given by a multi-commodity flow optimization problem. Further, we investigate their robustness in terms of how well they manage to cope with estimated traffic matrix data. For the evaluation we have access to network topology and traffic data from an operational IP network.

Caching for IPTV distribution with time-shift

Today video and TV distribution dominate Internet traffic and the increasing demand for high-bandwidth multimedia services puts pressure on Internet service providers. In this paper we simulate TV distribution with time-shift and investigate the effect of introducing a local cache close to the viewers. We study what impact TV program popularity, program set size, cache replacement policy and other factors have on the caching efficiency. The simulation results show that introducing a local cache close to the viewers significantly reduces the network load from TV-on-Demand services. By caching 4% of the program volume we can decrease the peak load during prime time by almost 50%. We also show that the TV program type and how program popularity changes over time can have a big influence on cache hit ratios and the resulting link loads.

Robust traffic engineering using l-balanced weight-settings in OSPF/IS-IS

Internet traffic volumes continue to grow at a great rate, now pushed by video and TV distribution in the networks. This brings up the need for traffic engineering mechanisms to better control the traffic. The objective of traffic engineering is to avoid congestion in the network and make good use of available resources by controlling and optimising the routing function. The challenge for traffic engineering in IP networks is to cope with the dynamics of Internet traffic demands. Today, the main alternative for intra-domain traffic engineering in IP networks is to use different methods for setting the weights in the routing protocols OSPF and IS-IS. In this paper we revisit the weight setting approach to traffic engineering but with focus on robustness. We propose l-balanced weight settings that route the traffic on the shortest paths possible but make sure that no link is utilised to more than a given level l. This gives efficient routing of traffic and controlled spare capacity to handle unpredictable changes in traffic. We present a heuristic search method for finding l-balanced weight settings and show that it works well in real network scenarios.