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Qualitative Communication has been proposed to increase the responsiveness of a network due to packet loss. The basic idea is to allow the network to drop part of the payload to preserve the integrity of the session (as opposed to dropping whole packets as in TCP).We consider this idea in the context of AR/VR and see how selectively dropping payload naturally fits with such an application where the data can be easily split within some critical and non-critical data. We present basic mechanism to leverage qualitative communications in 360 degree video streaming, as well as a pre-fetching scheme. We evaluate this proposal on actual 360 video traces and show the significant improvement of our proposal versus a vanilla transmission mechanism.

A new transport protocol is introduced to increase the responsiveness of the network to congestion. The new transport protocol, QUCO, reacts to congestion by selectively dropping off parts of a payload packet (combined with mitigation mechanisms to handle the loss of part of the payload). This packet trimming scheme greatly reduces the variations in the number of the packets going through the network. This allows to set tighter targets on the number of packets in flight and on the depth of the switch buffers. QUCO has less delay and much less delay variations than TCP. The resulting reduction in jitter is extremely useful, especially for media distribution.

The 5G cellular network's packet core architecture has adopted concepts of software-based networking to improve scale and flexibility. In this paper, we investigate potential improvements to the current architecture, the protocols for the 5G control plane and backhaul network to achieve signaling efficiencies, improve user experience, performance, scalability, and support low-latency communications.

The current Internet protocol suite, with its best-effort semantics, can result in potentially very different delivery characteristics for packets. Actually, no two paths (or even different packet flows on the same path) can be assumed to have identical properties in terms of bandwidth, delay and jitter. However, multi-site remote collaboration applications are highly inter-dependent and must remain consistent across multiple users. To this end, we introduce a new network capability, called coordinated communication service, and propose coordination points to support coordinated delivery of multiple flows in the network.

In the current Internet architecture, a packet is a minimal or fundamental unit upon which different actions such as classification,forwarding, or discarding are performed by the network nodes.When faced with constrained or poor network conditions, a packet is subjected to undesirable drops and re-transmissions, resulting in unpredictable delays and subsequent traffic overheads in the network. Alternately, we introduce qualitative communication services which allow partial, yet timely, delivery of a packet instead of dropping it entirely. These services allow breaking down packet payloads into smaller units (called chunks), enabling much finer granularity of bandwidth utilization. We propose Packet Wash as a new operation in forwarding nodes to support qualitative services. Upon packet error or network congestion, the forwarding node selectively removes some chunk(s)from the payload based on the relationship among the chunks or the individual significance level of each chunk. We also present a qualitative communication framework as well as a Packet Wash directive implemented in a newly evolved data plane technology,called Big Packet Protocol (BPP), Comment: Accepted in NEAT workshop, ACM SIGCOMM, August 2019, Beijing, China

Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP) and Message Queue Telemetry Transport (MQTT) are two IoT application layer protocols that are seeing increased attention and industry deployment. CoAP uses a request-response model and runs over UDP, while MQTT follows a publish-subscribe model running over TCP. For more constrained IoT devices, MQTTSensor Networks (MQTT-SN) provides a UDP-based transport between the sensor and an MQTT-SN gateway, while using TCP between that gateway and the MQTT broker. Quick UDP Internet Connections (QUIC) is a new protocol and although not originally designed for IoT devices, some design features such as reduced connection establishment time may be useful in an IoT environment. Each of these protocols seeks optimizations in features and implementation complexity based on application domains rather than having the full flexibility and adaptability of traditional transport protocols such as TCP. We investigate and analyze four protocols, namely, CoAP, MQTT, MQTT-SN and QUIC, to understand the overhead of obtaining data from an IoT device at a sink to potentially disseminate this data downstream. These constrained IoT devices often operate under challenging, varying network conditions, and it is important to understand the limitations of the protocols in such conditions. Thus, we evaluate the performance of these protocols under varying loss, delay and disruption conditions to identify the most effective environment for their operation and understand the limitations of their dynamic range. Results show that with non-confirmable CoAP a more adaptive wait timer is required; and a more streamlined QUIC protocol may be a potential alternative IoT protocol.

The evolution towards the Fifth Generation (5G) mobile networks will be characterized by ubiquitous connectivity, superior user experience, stringent reliability requirements and efficient management of a massive number of devices. These characteristics will lead to a growth of diverse services and business models, which will increase the service complexity. In order to meet the needs of future networks, cloud and virtualized technologies will be used. Network slicing is among the emerging virtualization concepts: the network resources are logically partitioned in sets, called network slices, which are properly selected in order to meet and support the communication service requirements for specific use cases. In a service centric 5G network, the foremost requirements are (a) distribution of offered services, and (b) flexible and automated discovery of a service by users. In this paper, we propose an efficient dynamic service discovery framework in the context of network slicing, based on the recently introduced concept of CloudCasting protocol. The proposed solution provides several benefits as service isolation, enhanced scalability, prompt reaction to mobility, natural accommodation of heterogeneous connectivity, and lightweight signaling to establish service discovery and distribution.

Deployment of wireless sensor networks is a key activity for the enhancement of the state-of-the-art wireless networking systems. In this paper, we present an architecture scheme capable to integrate several heterogeneous modules in a complete and inexpensive wireless dynamic sensor network system. The system can manage a high rate of data gathered from mobile units and can provide precise information in both real time and through a back end service. A real-world implementation of this system is proposed together with some in field performance measurements.