Transport and application layer approaches to improve end-to-end performance in the internet
Aleksandar Kuzmanovic, Amit Kumar Mondal · 2010
There is a growing demand for improved end-to-end network performance in the Internet. The “data” oriented Internet is now used by diverse set of applications with different end-to-end network performance requirements, which is measured in terms of certain network performance statistics, such as availability, jitter, latency, packet loss, bandwidth, etc. The ability of the network to guarantee a certain level of network performance to a data flow is called Quality of Service (QoS). My dissertation involves improving end-to-end network performance using transport and application layer approaches without explicit QoS support from the underlying IP network. In my dissertation, I mainly focus on two types of network applications—low latency TCP-based interactive application, and interactive multimedia services. I present end-point techniques, implemented at transport and application layers, that greatly improve the response time of low latency TCP-based interactive applications. To improve the quality of multimedia services, I have designed an overlay routing protocol that finds paths, efficiently and scalably, under multiple QoS constraints. Finally, I focus on diagnosing root causes of quality degradation of audio/video conferencing in IP networks. In particular, I quantify the impact of various network components on audio/video conferencing performance, and propose a WiFi Relay solution to significantly improve the quality of audio conferencing through WiFi connections.