Abstract-In this paper, we present a model for TCP/IP congestion control mechanism. The rate at which data is transmitted increases linearly in time until a packet loss is detected. At this point, the transmission rate is divided by a constant factor. Losses are generated by some exogenous random process which is assumed to be stationary ergodic. This allows us to account for any correlation and any distribution of inter-loss times. We obtain an explicit expression for the throughput of a TCP connection and bounds on the throughput when there is a limit on the window size. In addition, we study the effect of the Timeout mechanism on the throughput. A set of experiments is conducted over the real Internet and a comparison is provided with other models that make simple assumptions on the inter-loss time process. The comparison shows that our model approximates well the throughput of TCP for many distributions of inter-loss times.

Video streaming represents a large fraction of Internet traffic. Surprisingly, little is known about the network characteristics of this traffic. In this paper, we study the network characteristics of the two most popular video streaming services, Netflix and YouTube. We show that the streaming strategies vary with the type of the application (Web browser or native mobile application), and the type of container (Silverlight, Flash, or HTML5) used for video streaming. In particular, we identify three different streaming strategies that produce traffic patterns from non-ack clocked ON-OFF cycles to bulk TCP transfer. We then present an analytical model to study the potential impact of these streaming strategies on the aggregate traffic and make recommendations accordingly.

Abstract-Our goal is to design a traffic model for noncongested Internet backbone links, which is simple enough to be used in network operation, while being as general as possible. The proposed solution is to model the traffic at the flow level by a Poisson shotnoise process. In our model, a flow is a generic notion that must be able to capture the characteristics of any kind of data stream. We analyze the accuracy of the model with real traffic traces collected on the Sprint Internet protocol (IP) backbone network. Despite its simplicity, our model provides a good approximation of the real traffic observed in the backbone and of its variation. Finally, we discuss the application of our model to network design and dimensioning.

Automatic rate adaptation in CSMA/CA wireless networks may cause drastic throughput degradation for high speed bit rate stations (STAs). The CSMA/CA medium access method guarantees equal long-term channel access probability to all hosts when they are saturated. In previous work it has been shown that the saturation throughput of any STA is limited by the saturation throughput of the STA with the lowest bit rate in the same infrastructure. In order to overcome this problem, we first introduce in this paper a new model for finite load sources with multirate capabilities. We use our model to investigate the throughput degradation outside and inside the saturation regime. We define a new fairness index based on the channel occupation time to have more suitable definition of fairness in multirate environments. Further, we propose two simple but powerful mechanisms to partly bypass the observed decline in performance and meet the proposed fairness. Finally, we use our model for finite load sources to evaluate our proposed mechanisms in terms of total throughput and MAC layer delay for various network configurations.

Abstract-In this paper, we present a model for TCP/IP congestion control mechanism. The rate at which data is transmitted increases linearly in time until a packet loss is detected. At this point, the transmission rate is divided by a constant factor. Losses are generated by some exogenous random process which is assumed to be stationary ergodic. This allows us to account for any correlation and any distribution of inter-loss times. We obtain an explicit expression for the throughput of a TCP connection and bounds on the throughput when there is a limit on the window size. In addition, we study the effect of the Timeout mechanism on the throughput. A set of experiments is conducted over the real Internet and a comparison is provided with other models that make simple assumptions on the inter-loss time process. The comparison shows that our model approximates well the throughput of TCP for many distributions of inter-loss times.

Abstract:The new transmission media used to transport Internet tra c present di erent c haracteristics from the network TCP is tuned to. This results in a degradation in the performance of the protocol in terms of resource utlization and transfer delay. Many works have studied the performance of the protocol over these new transmission media. The majority of these works were interested in a particular environment such as a satellite network or a mobile network. A large number of solutions have been proposed to improve TCP performance. In this paper, we summarize the main problems of TCP and the proposed solutions. The originality of this work is that we conduct the study independently of the network type. Instead of talking about particular transmission supports, we consider the di erent possible characteristics of the connection path. We study then the e ect of these characteristics on TCP mechanisms. This analysis permits us to present an understanding of TCP problems, the limitations of the actual solutions and the required modi cations to let TCP cope with an heterogeneous Internet on an end-to-end basis.

Our goal is to design a traffic model for uncongested IP backbone links that is simple enough to be used in network operation, and that is protocol and application agnostic in order to be as general as possible. The proposed solution is to model the traffic at the flow level by a Poisson shot-noise process. In our model, a flow is a generic notion that must be able to capture the characteristics of any kind of data stream. We analyze the accuracy of the model with real traffic traces collected on the Sprint IP backbone network. Despite its simplicity, our model provides a good approximation of the real traffic observed in the backbone and of its variation. Finally, we discuss three applications of our model to network design and management.

Software-Defined Networking (SDN) abstracts lowlevel network functionalities to simplify network management and reduce costs. The OpenFlow protocol implements the SDN concept by abstracting network communications as flows to be processed by network elements. In OpenFlow, the high-level policies are translated into network primitives called rules that are distributed over the network. While the abstraction offered by OpenFlow allows to potentially implement any policy, it raises the new question of how to define the rules and where to place them in the network while respecting all technical and administrative requirements. In this paper, we propose a comprehensive study of the so-called OpenFlow rules placement problem with a survey of the various proposals intending to solve it. Our study is multi-fold. First, we define the problem and its challenges. Second, we overview the large number of solutions proposed, with a clear distinction between solutions focusing on memory management and those proposing to reduce signaling traffic to ensure scalability. Finally, we discuss potential research directions around the OpenFlow rules placement problem.