Exploring TCP Stream Rate Control in LAN Environments

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, RIVERSIDE

A Thesis submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of

Masters of Science

in

Computer Science

by

June, 2000

Thesis Committee:

Professor Mart Molle, Chairperson
Professor Satish Tripathi
Professor Thomas Payne

Copyright 2000
Steve Shah

Abstract

The demand is rising for multimedia applications requiring high bandwidth, low latency networks, such as video conferencing. Most local area networks, however, are not ready to cope with the additional load and thus the service quality will not meet user expectations. Mechanisms to control bandwidth such that applications can be guaranteed a certain level of network performance are either out of reach because of cost (e.g. ATM), only work in WAN environments (e.g. QoS-able routers), or have a limited scope (e.g. Linux's output-only QoS support).

For this thesis we explore a solution to this problem by modifying the Linux kernel such that it can control input streams using mechanisms already found in TCP. We believe that in combination with its existing output-only QoS support, a complete solution can be presented.

Our results are presented in two steps: the first validates our assertion that local area networks are in fact overly congested and require mechanisms to control QoS. The second shows that we are able to control bandwidth using our modified algorithm to compute TCP window sizes. Our solution does not require additional timers or the generation of additional control packets. However, the method has a limited range of rate adjustments and is only effective if the target rate is above some system dependent lower bound.

Contents
Postscript (official) version: thesis.ps.gz
An uncompressed version is at: thesis.ps
A Zip version is at: thesis.zip
And where would live be without pdf? thesis.pdf
For the daring, the raw datafiles that built the report writeup_final.tar.gz
[back]


Last neglected: Sun Jan 23 11:23:34 PST 2005