Noriaki Kamiyama

Simple and Accurate Identification of High-Rate Flows by Packet Sampling

Unfairness among best-effort flows is a serious problem on the Internet. In particular, UDP flows or unresponsive flows that do not obey the TCP flow control mechanism can consume a large share of the available bandwidth. High-rate flows seriously affect other flows, so it is important to identify them and limit their throughput by selectively dropping their packets. As link transmission capacity increases and the number of active flows increases, however, capturing all packet information becomes more difficult. In this paper, we propose a novel method of identifying high-rate flows by using sampled packets. The proposed method simply identifies flows from which Y packets are sampled without timeout. The identification principle is very simple and the implementation is easy. We derive the identification probability for flows with arbitrary flow rates and obtain an identification curve that clearly demonstrates the accuracy of identification. The characteristics of this method are determined by three parameters: the identification threshold Y , the timeout coefficient K, and the sampling interval N . To match the experimental identification probability to the theoretical one and to simplify the identification mechanism, we should set K to the maximum allowable value. Although increasing Y improves the identification accuracy, both the required memory size and the processing power grow as Y increases. Numerical evaluation using an actual packet trace demonstrated that the proposed method achieves very high identification accuracy with a much simpler mechanism than that of previously proposed methods.

ISP-Operated CDN

The transmission bandwidth consumed by delivering rich content, such as movie files, is enormous, so it is urgent for ISPs to design an efficient delivery system minimizing the amount of network resources consumed. To efficiently deliver web content, a content delivery networks (CDNs) have been widely used. CDN providers collocate a huge number of servers within multiple ISPs without being informed the detailed network information, i.e., network topologies, from ISPs. Minimizing the amount of network resources consumed is difficult because a CDN provider selects a server for each request based on only rough estimates of response time. To serve users rich content economically and efficiently, an ISP itself should optimally provide servers with huge storage capacities at a limited number of locations within its network. In this paper, we investigate the content deployment method, the content delivery process, and the server allocation method that are desirable for this ISP-operated CDN. Moreover, we evaluate the effectiveness of the ISP-operated CDN using network topologies of actual ISPs.

Renegotiated CBR transmission in interactive video-on-demand system

An interactive video-on-demand (IVOD) system requires transmission bandwidth allocation for each user. Since the volume of data in each video frame is variable, dynamic bandwidth allocation is desirable. In this paper, a new scheme that dynamically determines required bandwidth based on the queue length at the viewers set-top box (STB) is proposed. Although this method is in the renegotiated CBR (constant bit rate) category, it requires no precalculation, so it is easily applied to IVOD. The variance of the video transmission rate for each user is an important factor as it affects the service quality of other multiplexed traffic. It is desirable that the transmission rate is changed gradually. A multi-layer concept is introduced to achieve this. Through numerical evaluation using actual movie data, we demonstrate that the variance of the transmission rate is close to the optimal value and the bandwidth utilization is close to unity.

Network Topology Design Using Analytic Hierarchy Process

The topology of a network seriously affects its cost, reliability, throughput, and traffic pattern, etc, so we need to simultaneously consider these multiple criteria, which have different units, when evaluating network topologies. Moreover, we need to reflect the relative importance of each criterion when evaluating the network topology. However, ordinary methods of network topology design consider only a single criterion. In this paper, we apply AHP (analytic hierarchy process), which has been widely used when making a rational decision with multiple criteria, to network topology design. AHP enables us to reflect the relative importance of each criterion on the results. In network topology design, we need to consider a huge number of candidates, and the differences in the weights among candidates are small. Therefore, the optimum topologies will be determined by just the weighted criteria, and other criteria will not be considered. Therefore, to emphasize the difference of the weights, we propose to use a linear-transformed value of each criterion when constructing weights in AHP.

Improving Deployability of Peer-Assisted CDN Platform with Incentive

As a promising solution to manage the huge workload of large-scale VoD services, managed peer-assisted CDN systems, such as P4P [25] has attracted attention. Although the approach works well in theory or in a controlled environment, to our best knowledge, there have been no general studies that address how actual peers can be incentivized in the wild Internet; thus, deployablity of the system with respect to incentives to users has been an open issue. With this background in mind, we propose a new business model that aims to make peer-assisted approaches more feasible. The key idea of the model is that users sell their idle resources back to ISPs. In other words, ISPs can leverage resources of cooperative users by giving them explicit incentives, e.g., virtual currency. We show the high-level framework of designing optimal incentive amount to users. We also analyze how incentives and other external factors affect the efficiency of the system through simulation. Finally, we discuss other fundamental factors that are essential for the deployability of managed peer-assisted model. We believe that the new business model and the insights obtained through this work are useful for assessing the practical design and deployment of managed peer-assisted CDNs.

A Study on Detecting Network Anomalies Using Sampled Flow Statistics

We investigate how to detect network anomalies using flow statistics obtained through packet sampling. First, we show that network anomalies generating a huge number of small flows, such as network scans or SYN flooding, become difficult to detect when we execute packet sampling. This is because such flows are more unlikely to be sampled than normal flows. As a solution to this problem, we then show that spatially partitioning the monitored traffic into groups and analyzing the traffic of individual groups can increase the detectability of such anomalies. We also show the effectiveness of the partitioning method using network measurement data

A large-scale AWG-based single-hop WDM network using couplers with collision avoidance

Single-hop wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) networks based on a central arrayed waveguide grating (AWG) have attracted a great deal of attention as a solution for metropolitan area network applications because they can achieve high throughput with reduced cost due to the periodic wavelength-routing property of the AWG. Unfortunately, scalability is a significant problem in an AWG-based single-hop WDM network because the number of transceivers required at each node is equal to the total number of nodes. This problem can be solved by providing optical couplers between the AWG and the nodes and by aggregating multiple nodes before connecting to the AWG. In this case, however, packet collisions at the couplers will seriously increase the packet network delay. Therefore, we propose a novel AWG-based single-hop WDM network in which an autonomic collision avoidance mechanism is introduced in the couplers. We derive the optimum number of couplers for this architecture. Through numerical study, we clarify that the proposed network architecture can reduce the total network cost dramatically.

An efficient deterministic bandwidth allocation method in interactive video-on-demand systems

An interactive video-on-demand (IVOD) system requires continuous video playback, and network bandwidth should be allocated to satisfy quality of service (QOS) requirements. Bandwidth allocation methods can be classified into two categories: static and dynamic. There are two types of static allocation methods: deterministic and statistical. In deterministic allocation, bandwidth which provides deterministic QOS is allocated only at call setup time. Although the implementation is simpler than other methods, it suffers from low bandwidth utilization. In this paper, we propose a new deterministic static bandwidth allocation method which improves bandwidth utilization. This method does not require set-top box (STB) control. This decreases the STB cost and the signalling overhead in the network.

Detection accuracy of network anomalies using sampled flow statistics

We investigated the detection accuracy of network anomalies when using flow statistics obtained through packet sampling. Through a case study based on measurement data, we showed that network anomalies generating a large number of small flows, such as network scans or SYN flooding, become difficult to detect during packet sampling. We then developed an analytical model that enables us to quantitatively evaluate the effect of packet sampling and traffic conditions, such as anomalous traffic volume, on detection accuracy. We also investigated how the detection accuracy worsens when the packet sampling rate decreases. In addition, we show that, even with a low sampling rate, spatially partitioning monitored traffic into groups makes it possible to increase detection accuracy. We also developed a method of determining an appropriate number of partitioned groups, and we show its effectiveness. Copyright

Quasi-STM transmission method based on ATM network

In the ATM network, various kinds of traffic will be supported. This includes traffic which requires high quality of service. For example, coded HDTV requires no cell loss because of high compression and no possibility of retransmission. CBR (constant bit rate) services require no delay jitter. Thus, it will be required to support some class of services with no cell loss and no delay jitter. This paper proposes a new transmission method Q-STM, with which no cell loss and no delay jitter can be supported in the ATM network. The Q-STM introduces two new concepts into the ATM networks; frame structure and time slot reservation. A frame structure itself is similar to the framed ATM. However, in the Q-STM, a frame is divided into some subframes and each subframe is a unit of time switching in intermediate switching nodes. This leads to smaller end-to-end delay than that of the framed ATM. Time slots in a frame are reserved for each Q-STM call in a call setup phase and this leads to no delay jitter and no cell loss. Ordinary ATM service class is also supported and this kind of cell uses an empty slot which is not reserved or is not used because of fluctuation of Q-STM call transmission rate.