Congestion Control Algorithms

General Principles of Congestion Control Internetwork Routing Congestion Control in Virtual-Circuit Subnets Congestion Control in Datagram Subnets Load Shedding Jitter Control

Congestion

When too much traffic is offered, congestion sets in and performance degrades sharply.

General Principles of Congestion Control

A. Monitor the system . detect when and where congestion occurs. B. Pass information to where action can be taken. C. Adjust system operation to correct the problem.

Congestion Prevention Policies

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Policies that affect congestion.

Congestion Control in Virtual-Circuit Subnets: Admission control

(a) A congested subnet. (b) A redrawn subnet, eliminates congestion and a virtual circuit from A to B.

Congestion Control in Datagram Subnets: Warning Bit

The old DECNET and frame relay networks: A warning bit is sent back in the ack to the source in the case congestion. Every router on the path can set the warning bit.

unew auold (1 a ) f
Each router monitors its utilization u based on its temporary utilization f (either 0 or 1). a is a forgetness rate. If u is above a threshold, a warning state is reached.

Hop-by-Hop Choke Packets (in high speed nets)

It takes 30 ms for a choke packet to get from NY to SF. For a 155 Mbps, 4.6 Mbps gets in the pipe.
(a) A choke packet that affects only the source. (b) A choke packet that affects each hop it passes through.

Dropping packets
Load shedding: Wine Vs. Milk
Wine: drop new packets (keep old); good for file transfer Milk: drop old packets (keep new); good for mulitmedia Random Early Detection When the average queue length exceeds a threshold, packets are picked at random from the queue and discarded.

Jitter Control

(a) High jitter.

(b) Low jitter.

Quality of Service
Requirements Techniques for Achieving Good Quality of Service Integrated Services Differentiated Services Label Switching and MPLS

Requirements

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How stringent the quality-of-service requirements are.

ATM networks classify flows in four broad categories wrt their QoS demand: 1. 2. 3. 4. Constant bit rate (e.g., telephony) Real-time variable bit rate (e.g., video conferencing) Non-real-time variable bit rate (e.g., video streaming) Available bit rate (e.g., file transfer)

Buffering

Smoothing the output stream by buffering packets.

Traffic Shaping
The Leaky Bucket Algorithm

(a) A leaky bucket with water. (b) a leaky bucket with packets.

The Token Bucket Algorithm

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(a) Before.

(b) After.

Token bucket allows some burstiness (up to the number of token the bucket can hold)

The Leaky and Token Bucket Example

(a) Input to a bucket. (b) Output from a leaky bucket. Output from a token bucket with capacities of (c) 250 KB, (d) 500 KB, (e) 750 KB, (f) Output from a 500KB token bucket feeding a 10MB/sec leaky bucket.

Resource Reservation
Traffic shaping is more effective when all packets follow the same route. We can, similar to virtual circuits, assign a specific route to a flow and then reserve resources along that route. Three kinds of resources can be reserved: Bitrate Buffer space CPU cycles

Admission Control
We saw, resource reservation but how can the sender specify required resources ? Also, some applications are tolerant of occasional lapses is QoS. Also, apps might not know what its CPU requirements are. Hence routers must convert a set of specifications to resource requirements and then decide whether to accept or reject the flow.

An example of flow specification.

Proportional Routing
The idea here very different from what we have seen earlier. Here multiple paths are assigned to each flow and a appropriate fraction of the flow is sent simultaneously over each path. This technique is also called Multipath routing.

Packet Scheduling
If a router handling multiple flows uses first-come first-served method to process packets, there is possibility of some flows being starved. Fair queuing Weighted fair queuing

(a) A router with five packets queued for line O. (b) Finishing times for the five packets.

Integrated Services (IntServ)

A flow-based approach to QoS using resource reservation.
Set of protocols aimed at streaming multimedia and standardized by the IETF.

Allows both unicast and multicast transmissions.

Resource reSerVation Protocol (RSVP) is used to reserve the resources at intermediate routers between sender and receivers. RSVP allows: Multiple senders to transmit to multiple groups of receivers Permits individual users to switch channels freely Optimises bandwidth utilization while simultaneously eliminating congestion.

RSVP-The ReSerVation Protocol

Bandwidth reservation is done with reverse path forwarding along the spanning tree.

(a) A network, (b) The multicast spanning tree for host 1. (c) The multicast spanning tree for host 2.

RSVP-The ReSerVation Protocol (2)

(a) Host 3 requests a channel to host 1. (b) Host 3 then requests a second channel, to host 2. (c) Host 5 requests a channel to host 1.

A lighter approach to QoS

IntServ is very powerful but has some severe drawbacks: - There is a setup phase, this cases delay in starting data flow. - Routers need to maintain per-flow state. This approach is flow-based and not very scalable. - Complex router-to-router exchange of flow information. A simpler and approach was then designed by the IETF called, Differentiated Services (DiffServ).

DiffServ takes a class-based (as opposed to IntSev flow-based) approach to QoS

Differentiated Services (DiffServ)

Introduces services classes with corresponding forwarding rules.

Network operator can sell services. Every incoming packet carries a Type of Service field. Depending on the service class of a packet, it may receive preferential treatment. The number of classes are decided by the network operator.
Idea similar to overnight, two-day and surface delivery in courier services. Two simple classes are: Regular and expedited.

Expedited Forwarding

Expedited packets experience a traffic-free network, e.g., if 10% of the traffic is expedited and 90% regular, 20% bandwidth is dedicated to expedited traffic.

Assured Forwarding

A possible implementation of the data flow for assured forwarding. There are 4 priority classes and 3 discard probabilities: low, medium, high.

Label Switching and MPLS

Vendors, developed label switching/tag switching now called MPLS (MulitProtocol Label Switching) by the IETF. Idea is to apply labels to every packet and route using these labels.

Transmitting a TCP segment using IP, MPLS, and PPP (router-to-router).

Label Switching and MPLS

Comparison with virtual circuit techniques:
Similarities: - Both used tags/circuit ids. - Both lookup routing tables based on these tags. - Tags have link local significance only. Difference: - There is no setup phase in MPLS. - MPLS tags routes and not end-point processes (no transport id), so greater aggregation is possible. All MPLS circuits to a host can use the same tags. In ATM, only cells to the same application can use the same tag.

Internetworking
How Networks Differ How Networks Can Be Connected Concatenated Virtual Circuits Connectionless Internetworking Tunneling Internetwork Routing Fragmentation

Connecting Networks

A collection of interconnected networks.

How Networks Differ

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Some of the many ways networks can differ.

How Networks Can Be Connected

(a) Two Ethernets connected by a switch (data link layer). (b) Two Ethernets connected by routers (network layer).

Concatenated Virtual Circuits

Networks can be connected using connection-oriented techniques. This allows easier QoS between disparate networks. Only subnets internally using VCs can be connected this way.

Internetworking using concatenated virtual circuits with gateways (multiprotocol routers).

Connectionless Internetworking

A connectionless internet.

Comparing internetworking approaches

Connection oriented: Advantages: - Buffers can be reserved in advanced - Sequencing can be guaranteed - Short headers Disadvantages: - No alternate routing around congestion. - vulnerability to router failures - tables space at routers Connectionless oriented: Advantages: - Can be used to connected subnets without VCs inside. - Robust to router failures Disadvantage: - No sequencing - Longer headers

Internet Protocol (IP)

The idea is to design another protocol, independent of datalink layer protocols, so that its packets can be encapsulated over many datalink layer protocols. Then when you want to transfer data between different subnets, a multiprotocol router: (1) extracts the IP packet from datalink layer frame on one subnet, (2) encapsulates into datalink layer frame of another subnet (3) send the new frame IP allows diverse datalink layer subnets to exchange data. It is connectionless.

Interworking of two different networks is difficult. A solution to a special case is tunneling.

Tunneling a car from France to England.

Tunneling (packets)

Tunneling a packet from Paris to London.

Internetwork Routing

(a) An internetwork. (b) A graph of the internetwork. Two-level routing: Interior gateway protocol is used within each network Exterior gateway protocol is used between networks Gateway is a multiprotocol router.

Fragmentation

(a) Transparent fragmentation (ATM, reassembly at the exit gateway). (b) Nontransparent fragmentation (IP, reassembly at the receiver host).

Fragmentation (2)

Fragmentation when the elementary data size is 1 byte. (a) Original packet, containing 10 data bytes. (b) Fragments after passing through a network with maximum packet size of 8 payload bytes plus header. (c) Fragments after passing through a size 5 gateway.