Mitigating congestion and bufferbloat on satellite networks through a rate-based AQM

Satellite networking is known to suffer from specific network performance issues, such as high latency and low throughput stability; this derives mainly from the high propagation delay, in particular with GEO satellites. This characteristic poses limitations on the benefits that general AQM solutions could introduce; in fact, reducing congestion and mitigating queueing delay is a vital feature that could boost the performance of satellite networks. This paper investigates PINK (Passive INverse feedbacK), a queue management algorithm designed to indirectly impose an individual resource allocation policy in order to mitigate the bufferbloat effect and the network congestion while exploiting the channel throughput and guaranteeing optimal flow fairness without forcing any packet drop. PINK modifies the TCP Acknowledgements (ACKs) segments passing through the Satellite access gateway. The modification consists in replacing the advertised Receive Windows field (RCV.WNDs) with custom values, in order to enforce a particular bandwidth utilization upper bound. To compute new RCV.WND values, PINK needs only the number of active connections, the flows RTT and the transmission channel bandwidth. The design characteristics of this new AQM let it works efficiently in satellite networks, and we validate this statement through several simulations performed with the ns-3 network simulator.

[1]  Pedro Simplicio,et al.  Integration between terrestrial and satellite networks: the PPDR-TC vision , 2014, 2014 IEEE 10th International Conference on Wireless and Mobile Computing, Networking and Communications (WiMob).

[2]  Injong Rhee,et al.  CUBIC: a new TCP-friendly high-speed TCP variant , 2008, OPSR.

[3]  Jong-Tae Lim,et al.  Fair TCP congestion control in heterogeneous networks with explicit congestion notification , 2005 .

[4]  Heejung Byun,et al.  An explicit window adaptation algorithm over TCP networks using supervisory control , 2010, J. High Speed Networks.

[5]  Maurizio Casoni,et al.  Enabling resource pooling in wireless networks through software-defined orchestration , 2016, 2016 IEEE International Conference on Communications Workshops (ICC).

[6]  Antonio Pescapè,et al.  Dissecting Round Trip Time on the Slow Path with a Single Packet , 2014, PAM.

[7]  Paolo Valente,et al.  A low-latency and high-throughput scheduler for emergency and wireless networks , 2014, 2014 IEEE International Conference on Communications Workshops (ICC).

[8]  Cesare Roseti,et al.  Analysis and Performance Evaluation of a Burst-Based TCP for Satellite DVB RCS Links , 2010, IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking.

[9]  Carlo Caini,et al.  TCP Hybla: a TCP enhancement for heterogeneous networks , 2004, Int. J. Satell. Commun. Netw..

[10]  Gorry Fairhurst,et al.  Tackling Bufferbloat in capacity-limited networks , 2015, 2015 European Conference on Networks and Communications (EuCNC).

[11]  Stephen D. Strowes.  Passively measuring TCP round-trip times , 2013, Commun. ACM.

[12]  Maurizio Casoni,et al.  Reducing latency in satellite emergency networks through a cooperative transmission control , 2014, 2014 IEEE Global Communications Conference.

[13]  Mark Handley,et al.  Congestion control for high bandwidth-delay product networks , 2002, SIGCOMM '02.

[14]  Maurizio Casoni,et al.  An SDN and CPS Based Opportunistic Upload Splitting for Mobile Users , 2015, IoT 360.

[15]  Michael Welzl,et al.  The new AQM kids on the block: An experimental evaluation of CoDel and PIE , 2014, 2014 IEEE Conference on Computer Communications Workshops (INFOCOM WKSHPS).

[16]  Angelos Amditis,et al.  Performance evaluation and economic modelling of PPDR communication systems , 2015, 2015 IEEE 11th International Conference on Wireless and Mobile Computing, Networking and Communications (WiMob).

[17]  Maurizio Casoni,et al.  PINK: Proactive INjection into acK, a queue manager to impose fair resource allocation among TCP flows , 2015, 2015 IEEE 11th International Conference on Wireless and Mobile Computing, Networking and Communications (WiMob).

[18]  D Vassiliadis,et al.  Wireless networks at the service of effective first response work: The E-SPONDER vision , 2010, IEEE 5th International Symposium on Wireless Pervasive Computing 2010.

[19]  Maurizio Casoni,et al.  Implementation and validation of TCP options and congestion control algorithms for ns-3 , 2015, WNS3 '15.

[20]  Dario Rossi,et al.  Fighting the bufferbloat: On the coexistence of AQM and low priority congestion control , 2013, 2013 Proceedings IEEE INFOCOM.

[21]  Tomaso de Cola,et al.  A simulation study of network-coding-enhanced PEP for TCP flows in GEO satellite networks , 2014, 2014 IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC).

[22]  Nicolas Kuhn,et al.  Improving PIE's performance over high-delay paths , 2016, ArXiv.

[23]  Maurizio Casoni,et al.  Towards emergency networks security with per-flow queue rate management , 2015, 2015 IEEE International Conference on Pervasive Computing and Communication Workshops (PerCom Workshops).

[24]  K. K. Ramakrishnan,et al.  Explicit window adaptation: a method to enhance TCP performance , 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.

[25]  Kang Li,et al.  New Methods for Passive Estimation of TCP Round-Trip Times , 2005, PAM.

[26]  Mario Gerla,et al.  Generalized window advertising for TCP congestion control , 2002, Eur. Trans. Telecommun..