Karl-Johan Grinnemo

Towards transport-layer mobility: Evolution of SCTP multihoming

Recently, growing availability of emerging wireless technologies has pushed the demand to integrate different wireless-network technologies such as: wireless local-area networks, cellular networks, and personal and short-range networks. The inter-working of heterogeneous radio access networks poses many technical challenges, with mobility management being one of the most important. In this paper we survey the existing proposals and show that transport-layer mobility is a viable candidate for implementing seamless handover in heterogeneous wireless access networks. Since the mobile Stream Control Transmission Protocol (mSCTP) is at the core of most relevant transport-layer mobility schemes being currently studied, we identify the key scenarios where the protocol can effectively leverage the multihoming feature to enhance handover support. Moreover, to provide the reader with a complete overview of the mSCTPs application area, we also survey the situations where the use of mSCTP-based schemes is not possible or has some limitations. Then, in one of the identified key scenarios, we investigate several challenging open issues related to path management and path-transition optimization by considering bandwidth-estimation schemes and link-layer support. Finally, we consider introducing concurrent multipath transfer (CMT) into mSCTP-based mobility schemes, as a future research direction.

Performance Benefits of Avoiding Head-of-Line Blocking in SCTP

Mitigating the effects of head-of-line blocking (HoLB) was one of the major reasons the IETF SIGTRAN working group developed SCTP, a new transport protocol for PSTN signaling traffic, in the first place. However, studies of the impact of HoLB blocking on TCP and SCTP have given ambiguous results as to whether HoLB has, in fact, any significantly deteriorating effect on transmission delay. To this end, we have carried out a detailed experimental study on the quantitative effects of HoLB. Our study suggests that although HoLB could indeed incur a substantial delay penalty on a small fraction of the messages in an SCTP session, it has only a marginal impact on the average end-to-end transmission delay. We only observed improvements in the range of O% to 18% in average message transmission delay of using unordered delivery as compared to ordered delivery. Furthermore, there was a large variability in between different test runs, which often made the impact of HoLB statistically insignificant

An Analytical Estimation of the Failover Time in SCTP Multihoming Scenarios

The motivation behind this paper is a need to have a more accurate estimation of the failover time in SCTP. The traditional one, commonly used in the literature, is based on the sum of the consecutive retransmission timeouts. This is not always appropriate, especially when using the SCTP multihoming feature as a basis for achieving transport layer mobility in wireless networking scenarios, where the transition time between available paths becomes a key aspect for the optimisation. Two new factors are introduced into the proposed estimation formula to reflect the influence of the network parameters and the behaviour of the most common protocol implementations. For the proposed model, we perform a best-worst case analysis, and then illustrate it with an example of a detailed estimation. Finally, we perform simulations comparing our proposal with the traditional estimation in a typical transport layer mobility scenario including long thin networks.

SDN/NFV-Based Mobile Packet Core Network Architectures: A Survey

The emergence of two new technologies, namely, software defined networking (SDN) and network function virtualization (NFV), have radically changed the development of network functions and the evolution of network architectures. These two technologies bring to mobile operators the promises of reducing costs, enhancing network flexibility and scalability, and shortening the time-to-market of new applications and services. With the advent of SDN and NFV and their offered benefits, the mobile operators are gradually changing the way how they architect their mobile networks to cope with ever-increasing growth of data traffic, massive number of new devices and network accesses, and to pave the way toward the upcoming fifth generation networking. This survey aims at providing a comprehensive survey of state-of-the-art research work, which leverages SDN and NFV into the most recent mobile packet core network architecture, evolved packet core. The research work is categorized into smaller groups according to a proposed four-dimensional taxonomy reflecting the: 1) architectural approach, 2) technology adoption, 3) functional implementation, and 4) deployment strategy. Thereafter, the research work is exhaustively compared based on the proposed taxonomy and some added attributes and criteria. Finally, this survey identifies and discusses some major challenges and open issues, such as scalability and reliability, optimal resource scheduling and allocation, management and orchestration, and network sharing and slicing that raise from the taxonomy and comparison tables that need to be further investigated and explored.

Taxonomy and survey of retransmission-based partially reliable transport protocols

The mismatch between the services offered by the two standard transport protocols in the Internet, TCP and UDP, and the services required by distributed multimedia applications has led to the development of a large number of partially reliable transport protocols: protocols that in terms of reliability place themselves between TCP and UDP. This paper presents taxonomy for retransmission-based, partially reliable transport protocols, i.e. the subclass of partially reliable transport protocols that makes error recovery through retransmissions. The taxonomy comprises two classification schemes: one that classifies protocols with respect to the reliability service they offer and one that classifies them with respect to their error control scheme. The objective of our taxonomy is fourfold: to introduce a unified terminology; to provide a framework in which this class of protocols can be examined, compared and contrasted; to make explicit the error control schemes used by these protocols; and, finally, to gain new insight into these protocols and thereby suggest avenues for future research. Based on our taxonomy, a survey is made of existing retransmission-based, partially reliable transport protocols. The survey shows how protocols are categorized according to our taxonomy and exemplifies the majority of reliability services and error control schemes detailed in our taxonomy.

An SCTP-based Mobility Management Framework for Smartphones and Tablets

The current wireless network landscape comprises a plethora of technologies including WLAN, WiMAX and 3G, and not much speaks for a radical change of the state of affairs in the near future. In light of this, it becomes pivotal to facilitate vertical handover between different types of wireless networks. Although, a large number of vertical handover schemes have been proposed in the past several years, the majority of the proposed solutions reside in the network and/or link layer -- e.g., Mobile IP and various IEEE 802.21 schemes - and relatively few are transport-layer solutions. However, we think transport-layer solutions many times are attractive, particularly in cases where there are no economic incentives to upgrade the existing network infrastructure. To this end, we have designed a lightweight, transport-level mobility framework based on the Stream Control Transmission Protocol (SCTP) and its extension for dynamic address reconfiguration. The framework API has been kept very small and closely aligned with the SCTP sockets extensions, which makes porting of existing applications fairly straightforward. To demonstrate its usefulness for low-power tablets and smart phones, we have implemented our framework on a Motorola Xoom tablet running the Android OS. Our initial proof-of-concept experiment gave satisfactory results with a handover performance on par with that of other vertical handover solutions.

Tuning SCTP failover for carrier grade telephony signaling

The Stream Control Transmission Protocol (SCTP) has not only been selected as the signaling transport protocol of choice in IETF SIGTRAN, the architecture that bridges circuit-switched and IP-based mobile core networks, but also plays a pivotal role in SAE/LTE, the next-generation UMTS/HSPA networks. To meet the redundancy requirements of telecom signaling traffic, SCTP includes a failover mechanism that enables rerouting of traffic from an unreachable network path to a backup path. However, the recommendations provided by IETF on how to configure the SCTP failover mechanism to meet telecom signaling requirements are kept quite general and leave much of the tuning to the telecom equipment vendor and/or operator. Several works by us and others have been carried out to study the effect of different SCTP parameters on the failover performance. The main contribution of this paper is that it gives a coherent treatment of how to configure the SCTP failover mechanism for carrier-grade telephony signaling, and provides practically usable configuration recommendations. The paper also discusses an alternate or complementary way of optimizing the SCTP failover mechanism by relaxing the exponential backoff that foregoes a retransmission timeout in SCTP. Some results showing significantly reduced failover times by use of this mechanism, with only marginal deteriorating effects on a signaling network, are discussed and analyzed in the paper.

Impact of traffic load on SCTP failovers in SIGTRAN

With Voice over IP (VoIP) emerging as a viable alternative to the traditional circuit-switched telephony, it is vital that the two are able to intercommunicate. To this end, the IETF Signaling Transport (SIGTRAN) group has defined an architecture for seamless transportation of SS7 signaling traffic between a VoIP network and a traditional telecom network. However, at present, it is unclear if the SIGTRAN architecture will, in reality, meet the SS7 requirements, especially the stringent availability requirements. The SCTP transport protocol is one of the core components of the SIGTRAN architecture, and its failover mechanism is one of the most important availability mechanisms of SIGTRAN. This paper studies the impact of traffic load on the SCTP failover performance in an M3UA-based SIGTRAN network. The paper shows that cross traffic, especially bursty cross traffic such as SS7 signaling traffic, could indeed significantly deteriorate the SCTP failover performance. Furthermore the paper stresses the importance of configuring routers in a SIGTRAN network with relatively small queues. For example, in tests with bursty cross traffic, and with router queues twice the bandwidth-delay product, failover times were measured which were more than 50% longer than what was measured with no cross traffic at all. Furthermore, the paper also identifies some properties of the SCTP failover mechanism that could, in some cases, significantly degrade its performance.

NEAT: A Platform- and Protocol-Independent Internet Transport API

The sockets API has become the standard way that applications access the transport services offered by the IP stack. This article presents NEAT, a user space library that can provide an alternate transport API. NEAT allows applications to request the service they need using a new design that is agnostic to the specific choice of transport protocol underneath. This not only allows applications to take advantage of common protocol machinery, but also eases introduction of new network mechanisms and transport protocols. The article describes the components of the NEAT library and illustrates the important benefits that can be gained from this new approach. NEAT is a software platform for developing advanced network applications that was designed in accordance with the standardization efforts on transport services in the IETF, but its features exceed the envisioned functionality of a TAPS system.

A first study on using MPTCP to reduce latency for cloud based mobile applications

Currently, Multipath TCP (MPTCP) - a modification to standard TCP that enables the concurrent use of several network paths in a single TCP connection - is being standardized by IETF. This paper provides a comprehensive evaluation of the use of MPTCP to reduce latency and thus improve the quality of experience or QoE for cloud-based applications. In particular, the paper considers the possible reductions in latency that could be obtained by using MPTCP and multiple network paths between a cloud service and a mobile end user. To obtain an appreciation of the expected latency performance for different types of cloud traffic, three applications are studied, Netflix, Google Maps, and Google Docs, representing typical applications generating high-, mid-, and low-intensity traffic. The results suggest that MPTCP could provide significant latency reductions for cloud applications, especially for applications such as Netflix and Google Maps. Moreover, the results suggest that MPTCP offers a reduced latency despite a few percent packet loss, and in spite of limited differences in the round-trip times of the network paths in an MPTCP connection. Still, larger differences in the round-trip times seem to significantly increase the application latency, especially for Netflix, Google Maps, and similar applications. Thus, to become an even better alternative to these applications, this paper suggests that the MPTCP packet scheduling policy should be changed: Apart from the round-trip times of the network paths in a connection, it should also consider the difference in round-trip time between the network paths.