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CAIA's Collaborative Research Projects
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CAIA engages in collaborative projects
with institutions both nationally and internationally. Both active and
past projects are listed.
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Evaluation of FAST
TCP using Swinburne University's Broadband Access Research Testbed
(BART)
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Participants:
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Dr. Irena Atov, A/Prof. Grenville
Armitage and David Kennedy (CAIA, Swinburne University of Technology)
Dr. Bartek Wydrowski ( NETLAB ,
California Institute of Technology, USA)
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Dr. Lachlan Andrew and A/Prof.
Stephen Hanly ( CUBIN ,
University of Melbourne, Australia)
Description:
There is strong evidence that the
efficiency of the Internet is limited by its existing TCP congestion
control system. A replacement, called FAST TCP, is being designed at
Caltech to improve performance and it is emerging as a strong candidate
for a new IETF TCP standard. For its standardization and deployment, it
must be tested in a wide variety of environments, and it is necessary
that these tests be repeated by independent groups. To date, FAST has
been tested by Caltech and independent groups such as SLAC (Stanford
Linear Accelerator Center) and CERN (The European Particle Physics
Laboratory) in a wide range of high speed environments. However, there
is a pressing need for testing in low speed environments which are more
typical of the existing Internet. The current and medium term future of
access networks is in the 1-10 Mbps range, using such technologies as
ADSL and cable modem. FAST needs to work in these environments as well
as being able to scale to the high-speed regime. This project aims to
experimentally evaluate the performance of FAST under typical ‘edge of
network’ scenarios involving ADSL modems, cable modems and 802.11
wireless LANs. In particular, it will perform experiments using
Swinburne University's Broadband Access
Research Testbed (BART) . It will seek to identify all possible
failure modes of FAST in the test environments. The understanding
gained will also allow optimal parameter settings to be determined for
a range of conditions, such as link bandwidths, error rates and
propagation delays. More importantly, if weaknesses are discovered, it
will provide an opportunity to contribute to the evolving FAST
protocol.
Duration: Nov 2004 -
December 2005
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Sampling
Techniques for Non-Intrusive Statistical SLA Validation
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Participants:
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Sebastian Zander (CAIA, Swinburne
University of Technology)
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Tanja Zseby ( Fraunhofer Fokus ,
Germany)
Description:
Service
Level Agreements (SLAs) specify the network Quality of Service
(QoS) that providers are expected to deliver. Providers have to verify
if the actual quality of the network traffic complies with the SLA
without introducing significant additional network load and operational
costs. We propose a novel approach for non-intrusive SLA validation
that uses statistical SLAs and direct samples of the customer traffic
for the quality assessment. Based on pre-defined thresholds for QoS
metrics, we model the validation problem as proportion estimation of
non-conformant traffic. We compare the sampling errors of different
sampling techniques and present a novel solution for estimating the
error prior to the sampling. We also derive a solution for computing
the minimum sample fraction depending on the SLA parameters. Finally we
evaluate the proposed approach using real traffic from multiplayer
online games and prove that only a small fraction of the traffic needs
to be sampled to provide a customer with statistical SLA guarantees.
Duration: June 2004 -
December 2005
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NetSniff - a
Multi-Network-Layered Real-Time Traffic Capture and Analysis Tool
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Participants:
Description:
The
recent widespread uptake of broadband access technologies has led to a
shift in how the Internet is being used. The availability of an
always-connected, high-speed Internet connection means that home users
are increasingly likely to use the Internet as an information
repository and content delivery resource. Higher content access speeds
coupled with a zero connection time means that Internet usage can
become more spontaneous rather than planned for. The ICE3 project
considers whether the traditional Internet access model (where
bandwidth at the edge of the network is orders of magnitude lower than
within the core of the network) could support an explosion in the usage
of new and evolving Internet applications, and particularly if the
network capacity hieracrchy was inverted (more bandwdith at the edge
than within the core of the network). In order to do this we need to
statistically analyse the performance of networked applications in
either environment. This is achieved using , a multi-layered network
capture and analysis tool. This tool is under ongoing development to
increase the number of supported applications and develop an increasing
dataset of real-world traffic statistics. For more information please
visit the ICE3
website.
Duration: March 2004 -
March 2006
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Determining
Class-Based Bandwidth Allocations on Links in Multi-Service IP Networks
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Participants:
Description:
The
growth of the Internet has brought with it problems of service quality
that were not really thought of when the “best-effort” design of the
network was originally envisaged. The Internet is now planned to be
used by a variety of different services which have different kinds of
service requirements. These range from the old-fashioned “best-effort”
services to ones which require real-time traffic like voice or video to
be carried with reasonable delay, delay jitter and data loss. The
control of the network with this kind of traffic requires careful
resource provisioning as standard Weighted Fair Queueing (WFQ) service
disciplines employed in IP QoS networks can only provide tight
end-to-end delay guarantees for the classes if an adequate level of
resources (in terms of bandwidth and buffer space) is allocated along
their respective data paths through the network. In this project we
focus on development and analysis of recursive methods that can be used
for inversion of some of the well known traffic decomposition models
(e.g., QNA) and can provide basis for network dimensioning with
multiple service classes. The goal is to develop computationally
efficient algorithms for determining class-based bandwidth allocations
on the links subject to satisfying varying end-to-end QoS constraints
for the classes.
Duration: June 2004 -
December 2005
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An Australian node
of PingER
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Participants:
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A/Prof. Grenville Armitage (CAIA,
Swinburne University of Technology)
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Dr. Les Cottrell ( IEPM group, Stanford
Linear Accelerator Centre, USA)
Description:
PingER (Ping
End-to-end Reporting) is the name given to the Internet End-to-end
Performance Measurement (
IEPM ) project to monitor end-to-end performance of Internet
links. PingER involves hundreds of sites in many countries all over the
world. CAIA collaborated with IEPM to provide an Australian node to the
PingER project, which involved running regular 'ping' tests against a
list of international sites every 30 minutes and reporting our results
back to the IEPM team at Stanford's Linear Accelerator Centre. Our site
began operation in September 2002. As of January 2005 our PingER node
is temporarily offline.
Duration: September 2002 -
January 2005
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