Omar Elloumi

M2M Communications: A Systems Approach

A comprehensive introduction to M2M Standards and systems architecture, from concept to implementationFocusing on the latest technological developments, M2M Communications: A Systems Approach is an advanced introduction to this important and rapidly evolving topic. It provides a systems perspective on machine-to-machine services and the major telecommunications relevant technologies. It provides a focus on the latest standards currently in progress by ETSI and 3GPP, the leading standards entities in telecommunication networks and solutions. The structure of the book is inspired by ongoing standards developments and uses a systems-based approach for describing the problems which may be encountered when considering M2M, as well as offering proposed solutions from the latest developments in industry and standardization.The authors provide comprehensive technical information on M2M architecture, protocols and applications, especially examining M2M service architecture, access and core network optimizations, and M2M area networks technologies. It also considers dominant M2M application domains such as Smart Metering, Smart Grid, and eHealth. Aimed as an advanced introduction to this complex technical field, the book will provide an essential end-to-end overview of M2M for professionals working in the industry and advanced students.Key features:First technical book emerging from a standards perspective to respond to this highly specific technology/business segmentCovers the main challenges facing the M2M industry today, and proposes early roll-out scenarios and potential optimization solutionsExamines the system level architecture and clearly defines the methodology and interfaces to be consideredIncludes important information presented in a logical manner essential for any engineer or business manager involved in the field of M2M and Internet of ThingsProvides a cross-over between vertical and horizontal M2M concepts and a possible evolution path between the twoWritten by experts involved at the cutting edge of M2M developments

RED behavior with different packet sizes

We consider the adaptation of random early detection (RED) as a buffer management algorithm for TCP traffic in Internet gateways where different maximum transfer units (MTUs) are used. We studied the two RED variants described by Floyd and Jacobson (1993), and point out a weakness in both. The first variant where the drop probability is independent from the packet size discriminates connections with smaller MTUs. The second variant results in a very high packet loss ratio (PLR), and as a consequence low goodput, for connections with higher MTUs. We show that fairness in terms of loss and goodput can be supplied through an appropriate setting of the RED algorithm.

A simulation-based study of TCP dynamics over HFC networks

Abstract New broadband access technologies such as hybrid fiber coaxial (HFC) are likely to provide fast and cost effective support to a variety of applications including video on demand (VoD), inter-active computer games, and Internet-type applications such as Web browsing, ftp, e-mail, and telephony. Since most of these applications use TCP as the transport layer protocol, the key to their efficiency largely depends on TCP protocol performance. We investigate the performance of TCP in terms of effective throughput in an HFC network environment using different load conditions and network buffer sizes. We find that TCP experiences low throughput as a result of the well-known problem of ACK compression. An algorithm that controls ACK spacing is introduced to improve TCP performance.

IoT/M2M from research to standards: The next steps (part II) [Guest Editorial]

As the pace of IoT deployments accelerate, IoT standards are undergoing major evolutions, sometimes revolutions. For instance, cellular networks standards are now adding techniques to improve network performance to address traffic patterns generated by an increasing number of IoT devices. Ongoing discussions around 5G requirements may become game changing for M2M communications because the standard will be designed, from the ground-up, for massive scale IoT deployments. This is a radical shift compared to the “quick-fixes” 3GPP and 3GPP2 have been adding to 2G/3G and 4G standards so far. Another example of this radical shift is related to IoT service platforms (such as the platform standardized by oneM2M) and IoT applications. Semantic interoperability is now emerging as a major trend that allows data exchange between applications, an increased level of interoperability, analytics, and reasoning. With ontologies engineering, researchers will soon overcome the limitations of static data models and bridge the gap between the currently deployed vertical silos. Other areas that will see intense standardization activity are IoT security and low power wide area connectivity.

A relative bandwidth differentiated service for TCP micro-flows

The Internet Differentiated Services concept has broadened the quality of service requirements which an application can subscribe to with the introduction of relative service differentiation. By limiting differentiation to a limited number of classes, one can rely on simple traffic meters, queue management and scheduling mechanisms. Possible differentiation measures are bandwidth, delay and drop probability. It is clear that requirements of an application can be based on each of these measures or on a combination. The paper describes a new service that combines loss and delay differentiation to provide throughput differentiation for TCP micro-flows. The basic idea behind this service uses advances in TCP performance characterization, showing that TCP throughput is a function of the incurred network delay and the experienced loss. We show that combined relative delay and loss differentiation leads to bandwidth differentiation for individual TCP micro-flows.

Rate adaptive shaping for the efficient transport of data traffic in diffserv networks

Abstract In this paper, we introduce the need for traffic shaping for the efficient transport of aggregate Internetworking traffic over Differentiated Services (DiffServ) networks. We propose a family of rate adaptive shapers (RASs) that aim at reducing the traffic burstiness. Although RASs can be used in either pure Best-Effort or any QoS enabled networks, our study is focused on their use in DiffServ networks where the traffic is subject to traffic control consisting of marking the packets according to a pre-negotiated traffic conditioning specification. RASs aim to increase the ratio of packets that are assigned the highest level of forwarding treatment by buffering and appropriate scheduling of packets before applying traffic control functions. The key ideas that motivate RASs design are introduced and evaluated by means of extensive simulations. Some additional enhancements are also discussed.

A Multi-color Marking Scheme to Achieve Fair Bandwidth Allocation

Mechanisms for achieving fair bandwidth sharing have been a hot research topic for many years. Protection of well-behaved flows and possible simplification of end-to-end congestion control mechanisms are the ultimate challenges driving the need for research in this area. Rate-based schedulers, such as weighted fair queuing, require per-flow state information in the routers and in addition a mechanism to determine which packets to drop under congestion. Therefore they are too complex to be implemented in high-speed networks. To address this issue many other schemes have been proposed among them core stateless fair queuing (CSFQ) [1], constitutes the most revolutionary approach. In this paper we propose an edge-marking scheme that achieves fair bandwidth allocation by marking packets belonging to the same flow with different colors, i.e. layers, according to a token bucket scheme. The interior routers implement a Random Early Detection (RED) [12] based buffer acceptance mechanism that is able to drop packets based on their color. This buffer acceptance mechanism estimates the layer that is causing the congestion and drops packets according to a RED drop function. Using simulations we prove that this mechanism is stable and achieves a fair distribution of the bottleneck bandwidth.