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Emerging 5G/6G use cases span various industries, necessitating flexible solutions that leverage emerging technologies to meet diverse and stringent application requirements under changing network conditions. The standard 5G RAN solution, retransmission, reduces packet loss but can increase transmission delay in the process. Random Linear Network Coding (RLNC) offers an alternative by proactively sending combinations of original packets, thus reducing both delay and packet loss. Current research often only simulates the integration of RLNC in 5G while we implement and evaluate our approach on real commercially available hardware in a real-world deployment. We introduce Flexible Network Coding (FlexNC), which enables the flexible fusion of several RLNC protocols by incorporating a forwarder with multiple RLNC nodes. Network operators can configure FlexNC based on network conditions and application requirements. To further boost network programmability, our Recoder in the Network (RecNet) leverages intermediate network nodes to join the coding process. Both the proposed algorithms have been implemented on OpenAirInterface and extensively tested with traffic from different applications in a real network. While FlexNC adapts to various application needs of latency and packet loss, RecNet significantly minimizes packet loss for a remote user with minimal increase in delay compared to pure RLNC.

Robust, reliable, and deterministic networks are essential for a variety of applications. In order to provide guaranteed communication network services, Time-Sensitive Networking (TSN) unites a set of standards for time-synchronization, flow control, enhanced reliability, and management. We design the TSN-FlexTest testbed with generic commodity hardware and open-source software components to enable flexible TSN measurements. We have conducted extensive measurements to validate the TSN-FlexTest testbed and to examine TSN characteristics. The measurements provide insights into the effects of TSN configurations, such as increasing the number of synchronization messages for the Precision Time Protocol, indicating that a measurement accuracy of 15 ns can be achieved. The TSN measurements included extensive evaluations of the Time-aware Shaper (TAS) for sets of Tactile Internet (TI) packet traffic streams. The measurements elucidate the effects of different scheduling and shaping approaches, while revealing the need for pervasive network control that synchronizes the sending nodes with the network switches. We present the first measurements of distributed TAS with synchronized senders on a commodity hardware testbed, demonstrating the same Quality-of-Service as with dedicated wires for high-priority TI streams despite a 200% over-saturation cross traffic load. The testbed is provided as an open-source project to facilitate future TSN research., Comment: 30 pages, 18 figures, 6 tables, IEEE TNSM, in print, 2024. Shorter version in print in IEEE Trans. on Network and Service Management (see related DOI below)

K-12 engineering outreach has typically focused on elementary electrical and mechanical engineering or robot experiments integrated in science or math classes. In contrast, we propose a novel outreach program focusing on communication network principles that enable the ubiquitous web and smart-phone applications. We design outreach activities that illustrate the communication network principles through activities and team competitions in physical education (PE) as well as story writing and cartooning in English Language Arts (ELA) classes. The PE activities cover the principles of store-and-forward packet switching, Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) web page download, connection establishment in cellular wireless networks, as well as packet routing in Software-Defined Networking (SDN). The proposed outreach program has been formatively evaluated by K-12 teachers. A survey for the evaluation of the impact of the outreach program on the student perceptions, specifically, the students' interest, self-efficacy, utility, and negative stereotype perceptions towards communication network engineering, is also presented.

The use of Ethernet switched networks usually involves best effort service. A recent effort by the IEEE 802.1/3 TSN group has sought to standardize the Ethernet data-link protocol such that it operates on a deterministic service in addition to the best effort service targeting Operational Technology applications, e.g., industrial control systems. This paper investigates the Cyclic Queueing and Forwarding (CQF) and Paternoster scheduling protocols in a typical industrial control loop with varying propagation delays emulating large scale networks. Our main findings for CQF and Paternoster are that CQF has an advantage towards real-time streams with hard-deadlines whilst Paternoster is for streams with more relaxed deadlines but can operate without time synchronization.

As new networking paradigms emerge for different networking applications, e.g., cyber-physical systems, and different services are handled under a converged data link technology, e.g., Ethernet, certain applications with mission critical traffic cannot coexist on the same physical networking infrastructure using traditional Ethernet packet-switched networking protocols. The IEEE 802.1Q Time Sensitive Networking (TSN) task group is developing protocol standards to provide deterministic properties on Ethernet based packet-switched networks. In particular, the IEEE 802.1Qcc, centralized management and control, and the IEEE 802.1Qbv, Time-Aware Shaper, can be used to manage and control scheduled traffic streams with periodic properties along with best-effort traffic on the same network infrastructure. In this paper, we investigate the effects of using the IEEE 802.1Qcc management protocol to accurately and precisely configure TAS enabled switches (with transmission windows governed by gate control lists (GCLs) with gate control entries (GCEs)) ensuring ultra-low latency, zero packet loss, and minimal jitter for scheduled TSN traffic. We examine both a centralized network/distributed user model (hybrid model) and a fully-distributed (decentralized) 802.1Qcc model on a typical industrial control network with the goal of maximizing scheduled traffic streams.

This paper provides a comprehensive survey of queueing and scheduling mechanisms for supporting large scale deterministic networks (LDNs). The survey finds that extensive mechanism design research and standards development for LDNs has been conducted over the past few years. However, these mechanism design studies have not been followed up with a comprehensive rigorous evaluation. The main outcome of this survey is a clear organization of the various research and standardization efforts towards queueing and scheduling mechanisms for LDNs as well as the identification of the main strands of mechanism development and their interdependencies. Based on this survey, it appears urgent to conduct a comprehensive rigorous simulation study of the main strands of mechanisms.

Many network applications, e.g., industrial control, demand Ultra-Low Latency (ULL). However, traditional packet networks can only reduce the end-to-end latencies to the order of tens of milliseconds. The IEEE 802.1 Time Sensitive Networking (TSN) standard and related research studies have sought to provide link layer support for ULL networking, while the emerging IETF Deterministic Networking (DetNet) standards seek to provide the complementary network layer ULL support. This article provides an up-to-date comprehensive survey of the IEEE TSN and IETF DetNet standards and the related research studies. The survey of these standards and research studies is organized according to the main categories of flow concept, flow synchronization, flow management, flow control, and flow integrity. ULL networking mechanisms play a critical role in the emerging fifth generation (5G) network access chain from wireless devices via access, backhaul, and core networks. We survey the studies that specifically target the support of ULL in 5G networks, with the main categories of fronthaul, backhaul, and network management. Throughout, we identify the pitfalls and limitations of the existing standards and research studies. This survey can thus serve as a basis for the development of standards enhancements and future ULL research studies that address the identified pitfalls and limitations.

The Remote-PHY (R-PHY) modular cable network for Data over Cable Service Interface Specification (DOCSIS) service conducts the physical layer processing for the transmissions over the broadcast cable in a remote node. In contrast, the cloud radio access network (CRAN) for Long-Term Evolution (LTE) cellular wireless services conducts all baseband physical layer processing in a central baseband unit and the remaining physical layer processing steps towards radio frequency (RF) transmission in remote nodes. Both DOCSIS and LTE are based on Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) physical layer processing. We propose to unify cable and wireless cellular access networks by utilizing the hybrid fiber-coax (HFC) cable network infrastructure as fiber fronthaul network for cellular wireless services. For efficient operation of such a unified access network, we propose a novel Remote-FFT (R-FFT) node that conducts the physical layer processing from the Fast-Fourier Transform (FFT) module towards the RF transmission, whereby DOCSIS and LTE share a common FFT module. The frequency domain in-phase and quadrature (I/Q) symbols for both DOCSIS and LTE are transmitted over the fiber between remote node and cable headend, where the remaining physical layer processing is conducted. We further propose to cache repetitive quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) symbols in the R-FFT node to reduce the fronthaul bitrate requirements and enable statistical multiplexing. We evaluate the fronthaul bitrate reductions achieved by R-FFT node caching, the fronthaul transmission bitrates arising from the unified DOCSIS and LTE service, and illustrate the delay implications of moving part of the cable R-PHY remote node physical layer processing to the headend., Comment: IEEE Transactions on Broadcasting, in print, 2018

The emerging Software Defined Networking (SDN) paradigm separates the data plane from the control plane and centralizes network control in an SDN controller. Applications interact with controllers to implement network services, such as network transport with Quality of Service (QoS). SDN facilitates the virtualization of network functions so that multiple virtual networks can operate over a given installed physical network infrastructure. Due to the specific characteristics of optical (photonic) communication components and the high optical transmission capacities, SDN based optical networking poses particular challenges, but holds also great potential. In this article, we comprehensively survey studies that examine the SDN paradigm in optical networks; in brief, we survey the area of Software Defined Optical Networks (SDONs). We mainly organize the SDON studies into studies focused on the infrastructure layer, the control layer, and the application layer. Moreover, we cover SDON studies focused on network virtualization, as well as SDON studies focused on the orchestration of multilayer and multidomain networking. Based on the survey, we identify open challenges for SDONs and outline future directions.

In a hybrid PON/xDSL access network, multiple Customer Premise Equipment (CPE) nodes connect over individual Digital Subscriber Lines (DSLs) to a drop-point device. The drop-point device, which is typically reverse powered from the customer, is co-located with an Optical Network Unit (ONU) of the Passive Optical Network (PON). We demonstrate that the drop-point experiences very high buffer occupancies when no flow control or standard Ethernet PAUSE frame flow control is employed. In order to reduce the buffer occupancies in the drop-point, we introduce two gated flow control protocols that extend the polling-based PON medium access control to the DSL segments between the CPEs and the ONUs. We analyze the timing of the gated flow control mechanisms to specify the latest possible time instant when CPEs can start the DSL upstream transmissions so that the ONU can forward the upstream transmissions at the full PON upstream transmission bit rate. Through extensive simulations for a wide range of bursty traffic models, we find that the gated flow control mechanisms, specifically, the ONU and CPE grant sizing policies, enable effective control of the maximum drop-point buffer occupancies.

Software defined networking (SDN) has emerged as a promising paradigm for making the control of communication networks flexible. SDN separates the data packet forwarding plane, i.e., the data plane, from the control plane and employs a central controller. Network virtualization allows the flexible sharing of physical networking resources by multiple users (tenants). Each tenant runs its own applications over its virtual network, i.e., its slice of the actual physical network. The virtualization of SDN networks promises to allow networks to leverage the combined benefits of SDN networking and network virtualization and has therefore attracted significant research attention in recent years. A critical component for virtualizing SDN networks is an SDN hypervisor that abstracts the underlying physical SDN network into multiple logically isolated virtual SDN networks (vSDNs), each with its own controller. We comprehensively survey hypervisors for SDN networks in this article. We categorize the SDN hypervisors according to their architecture into centralized and distributed hypervisors. We furthermore sub-classify the hypervisors according to their execution platform into hypervisors running exclusively on general-purpose compute platforms, or on a combination of general-purpose compute platforms with general- or special-purpose network elements. We exhaustively compare the network attribute abstraction and isolation features of the existing SDN hypervisors. As part of the future research agenda, we outline the development of a performance evaluation framework for SDN hypervisors., Comment: IEEE Communications Surveys and Tutorials, in print, 2015

Dynamic circuits are well suited for applications that require predictable service with a constant bit rate for a prescribed period of time, such as cloud computing and e-science applications. Past research on upstream transmission in passive optical networks (PONs) has mainly considered packet-switched traffic and has focused on optimizing packet-level performance metrics, such as reducing mean delay. This study proposes and evaluates a dynamic circuit and packet PON (DyCaPPON) that provides dynamic circuits along with packet-switched service. DyCaPPON provides $(i)$ flexible packet-switched service through dynamic bandwidth allocation in periodic polling cycles, and $(ii)$ consistent circuit service by allocating each active circuit a fixed-duration upstream transmission window during each fixed-duration polling cycle. We analyze circuit-level performance metrics, including the blocking probability of dynamic circuit requests in DyCaPPON through a stochastic knapsack-based analysis. Through this analysis we also determine the bandwidth occupied by admitted circuits. The remaining bandwidth is available for packet traffic and we conduct an approximate analysis of the resulting mean delay of packet traffic. Through extensive numerical evaluations and verifying simulations we demonstrate the circuit blocking and packet delay trade-offs in DyCaPPON.

A wide array of dynamic bandwidth allocation (DBA) mechanisms have recently been proposed for improving bandwidth utilization and reducing idle times and packets delays in passive optical networks (PONs). The DBA evaluation studies commonly assumed that the report message for communicating the bandwidth demands of the distributed optical network units (ONUs) to the central optical line terminal (OLT) is scheduled for the end of an ONU's upstream transmission, after the ONU's payload data transmissions. In this article, we conduct a detailed investigation of the impact of the report message scheduling (RMS), either at the beginning (i.e., before the pay load data) or the end of an ONU upstream transmission on PON performance. We analytically characterize the reduction in channel idle time with reporting at the beginning of an upstream transmission compared to reporting at the end. Our extensive simulation experiments consider both the Ethernet Passive Optical Networking (EPON) standard and the Gigabit PON (GPON) standard. We find that for DBAs with offline sizing and scheduling of ONU upstream transmission grants at the end of a polling cycle, which processes requests from all ONUs, reporting at the beginning gives substantial reductions of mean packet delay at high loads. For high-performing DBAs with online grant sizing and scheduling, which immediately processes individual ONU requests, or interleaving of ONUs groups, both reporting at the beginning or end give essentially the same average packet delays.

The network transport of 3D video, which contains two views of a video scene, poses significant challenges due to the increased video data compared to conventional single-view video. Addressing these challenges requires a thorough understanding of the traffic and multiplexing characteristics of the different representation formats of 3D video. We examine the average bitrate-distortion (RD) and bitrate variability-distortion (VD) characteristics of three main representation formats. Specifically, we compare multiview video (MV) representation and encoding, frame sequential (FS) representation, and side-by-side (SBS) representation, whereby conventional single-view encoding is employed for the FS and SBS representations. Our results for long 3D videos in full HD format indicate that the MV representation and encoding achieves the highest RD efficiency, while exhibiting the highest bitrate variabilities. We examine the impact of these bitrate variabilities on network transport through extensive statistical multiplexing simulations. We find that when multiplexing a small number of streams, the MV and FS representations require the same bandwidth. However, when multiplexing a large number of streams or smoothing traffic, the MV representation and encoding reduces the bandwidth requirement relative to the FS representation.

Building on the Ethernet Passive Optical Network (EPON) and Gigabit PON (GPON) standards, Next-Generation (NG) PONs (i) provide increased data rates, split ratios, wavelengths counts, and fiber lengths, as well as (ii) allow for all-optical integration of access and metro networks. In this paper we provide a comprehensive probabilistic analysis of the capacity (maximum mean packet throughput) and packet delay of subnetworks that can be used to form NG-PONs. Our analysis can cover a wide range of NG-PONs through taking the minimum capacity of the subnetworks making up the NG-PON and weighing the packet delays of the subnetworks. Our numerical and simulation results indicate that our analysis quite accurately characterizes the throughput-delay performance of EPON/GPON tree networks, including networks upgraded with higher data rates and wavelength counts. Our analysis also characterizes the trade-offs and bottlenecks when integrating EPON/GPON tree networks across a metro area with a ring, a Passive Star Coupler (PSC), or an Arrayed Waveguide Grating (AWG) for uniform and non-uniform traffic. To the best of our knowledge, the presented analysis is the first to consider multiple PONs interconnected via a metro network., Comment: Technical Report, School of Electrical, Computer, and Energy Eng., Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ

Current Gigabit-class passive optical networks (PONs) evolve into next-generation PONs, whereby high-speed 10+ Gb/s time division multiplexing (TDM) and long-reach wavelength-broadcasting/routing wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) PONs are promising near-term candidates. On the other hand, next-generation wireless local area networks (WLANs) based on frame aggregation techniques will leverage physical layer enhancements, giving rise to Gigabit-class very high throughput (VHT) WLANs. In this paper, we develop an analytical framework for evaluating the capacity and delay performance of a wide range of routing algorithms in converged fiber-wireless (FiWi) broadband access networks based on different next-generation PONs and a Gigabit-class multi-radio multi-channel WLAN-mesh front-end. Our framework is very flexible and incorporates arbitrary frame size distributions, traffic matrices, optical/wireless propagation delays, data rates, and fiber faults. We verify the accuracy of our probabilistic analysis by means of simulation for the wireless and wireless-optical-wireless operation modes of various FiWi network architectures under peer-to-peer, upstream, uniform, and nonuniform traffic scenarios. The results indicate that our proposed optimized FiWi routing algorithm (OFRA) outperforms minimum (wireless) hop and delay routing in terms of throughput for balanced and unbalanced traffic loads, at the expense of a slightly increased mean delay at small to medium traffic loads., Comment: Technical Report, School of Electrical, Computer, and Energy Eng. Arizona State University, Tempe

This study investigated whether it was more beneficial to provide the learners in computer-based learning environments access to on demand (self-regulated) help after they committed an error in problem solving or for the learning environment to externally regulate the presentation of instructional help. Furthermore, two different resentational formats textual and pictorial of instructional prompts were examined. This study was conducted with a computer-based learning environment that introduced high school students without any prior content-specific knowledge to the principles of parallel and series electrical circuit analysis. We found that textual prompts facilitated problem solving statistically significantly better than pictorial prompts. Moreover, the learners provided with externally regulated prompts reported statistically significantly more positive attitudes toward the prompts than learners in the self-regulated conditions. Finally, the continuing motivation was statistically significantly stronger in learners who viewed textual prompts than in their counterparts in the pictorial prompt groups.

Packet-switching WDM ring networks with a hotspot transporting unicast, multicast, and broadcast traffic are important components of high-speed metropolitan area networks. For an arbitrary multicast fanout traffic model with uniform, hotspot destination, and hotspot source packet traffic, we analyze the maximum achievable long-run average packet throughput, which we refer to as \textit{multicast capacity}, of bi-directional shortest-path routed WDM rings. We identify three segments that can experience the maximum utilization, and thus, limit the multicast capacity. We characterize the segment utilization probabilities through bounds and approximations, which we verify through simulations. We discover that shortest-path routing can lead to utilization probabilities above one half for moderate to large portions of hotspot source multi- and broadcast traffic, and consequently multicast capacities of less than two simultaneous packet transmissions. We outline a one-copy routing strategy that guarantees a multicast capacity of at least two simultaneous packet transmissions for arbitrary hotspot source traffic.