Opportunistic Fair Parallel Download Protocol

Parallel download protocols that establish multiple TCP connections to distributed replica servers have the potential to reduce file download time and to achieve a server-side load balancing. Unfortunately, parallel download protocols are also inherently unfair towards single-flow downloads and may even starve them. This paper presents TCP-ROME, a parallel download protocol that allows a dynamic mitigation of throughput and fairness. The key novelty is a receiver-based framework that allows a dynamic adjustment of the congestion and rate control of each subconnection. TCP-ROME offers two usage modes: a binary mode where the congestion control of each subconnection can be switched between a TCP-fair rate (high priority) and at a TCP-LP fair rate (low priority), and a more complex range mode where the aggregated throughput aims at meeting a specified target rate. Apart from the protocol specification, this paper develops novel analytical throughput models for TCP-LP and for TCP-ROME. The models are validated via simulations. Extensive simulation scenarios show the flexibility of TCP-ROME in mitigating performance for fairness.

[1]  Peter A. Dinda,et al.  Modeling and taming parallel TCP on the wide area network , 2005, 19th IEEE International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium.

[2]  Hui Zhang,et al.  Measurement-based optimization techniques for bandwidth-demanding peer-to-peer systems , 2003, IEEE INFOCOM 2003. Twenty-second Annual Joint Conference of the IEEE Computer and Communications Societies (IEEE Cat. No.03CH37428).

[3]  Ketan Mayer-Patel,et al.  Aggregate congestion control for distributed multimedia applications , 2004, IEEE INFOCOM 2004.

[4]  B. Cohen,et al.  Incentives Build Robustness in Bit-Torrent , 2003 .

[5]  Sally Floyd,et al.  HighSpeed TCP for Large Congestion Windows , 2003, RFC.

[6]  Jia Wang,et al.  Analyzing peer-to-peer traffic across large networks , 2004, IEEE/ACM Trans. Netw..

[7]  Michael F. Schwartz,et al.  Locating nearby copies of replicated Internet servers , 1995, SIGCOMM '95.

[8]  Riccardo Bettati,et al.  Collaborative congestion control in parallel TCP flows , 2005, IEEE International Conference on Communications, 2005. ICC 2005. 2005.

[9]  Mark Crovella,et al.  Server selection using dynamic path characterization in wide-area networks , 1997, Proceedings of INFOCOM '97.

[10]  Donald F. Towsley,et al.  Modeling TCP throughput: a simple model and its empirical validation , 1998, SIGCOMM '98.

[11]  Srinivasan Seshan,et al.  An integrated congestion management architecture for Internet hosts , 1999, SIGCOMM '99.

[12]  E.W. Knightly,et al.  TCP-PARIS: a parallel download protocol for replicas , 2005, 10th International Workshop on Web Content Caching and Distribution (WCW'05).

[13]  Anees Shaikh,et al.  On the effectiveness of DNS-based server selection , 2001, Proceedings IEEE INFOCOM 2001. Conference on Computer Communications. Twentieth Annual Joint Conference of the IEEE Computer and Communications Society (Cat. No.01CH37213).

[14]  M. Dahlin,et al.  TCP Nice: a mechanism for background transfers , 2002, OSDI '02.

[15]  Stefan Savage,et al.  Modeling TCP latency , 2000, Proceedings IEEE INFOCOM 2000. Conference on Computer Communications. Nineteenth Annual Joint Conference of the IEEE Computer and Communications Societies (Cat. No.00CH37064).

[16]  D. Towsley,et al.  Combining Multipath Routing and Congestion Control for Robustness , 2006, 2006 40th Annual Conference on Information Sciences and Systems.

[17]  E.W. Knightly,et al.  TCP-LP: low-priority service via end-point congestion control , 2006, IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking.

[18]  Rayadurgam Srikant,et al.  Modeling and performance analysis of BitTorrent-like peer-to-peer networks , 2004, SIGCOMM 2004.

[19]  Krishna P. Gummadi,et al.  Measurement, modeling, and analysis of a peer-to-peer file-sharing workload , 2003, SOSP '03.

[20]  Ellen W. Zegura,et al.  A novel server selection technique for improving the response time of a replicated service , 1998, Proceedings. IEEE INFOCOM '98, the Conference on Computer Communications. Seventeenth Annual Joint Conference of the IEEE Computer and Communications Societies. Gateway to the 21st Century (Cat. No.98.

[21]  Jim Kurose,et al.  Multimedia streaming via TCP: an analytic performance study , 2004, SIGMETRICS 2004.

[22]  Robert L. Grossman,et al.  PSockets: The Case for Application-level Network Striping for Data Intensive Applications using High Speed Wide Area Networks , 2000, ACM/IEEE SC 2000 Conference (SC'00).

[23]  Ian T. Foster,et al.  Data management and transfer in high-performance computational grid environments , 2002, Parallel Comput..

[24]  Brian D. Noble,et al.  Improving throughput and maintaining fairness using parallel TCP , 2004, IEEE INFOCOM 2004.