Design and implementation of a QoS-Supportive system for reliable multicast

Abstract

As the Internet is increasingly being used by business companies to offer and procure services, providers of networked system services are expected to assure customers of specific Quality of Service (QoS) they could offer. This leads to scenarios where users prefer to negotiate required QoS guarantees prior to accepting a service, and service providers assess their ability to provide the customer with the requested QoS on the basis of existing resource availability. A system to be deployed in such scenarios should, in addition to providing the services, (i) monitor resource availability, (ii) be able to assess whether or not requested QoS can be met, and (iii) adapt to QoS perturbations (e.g., node failures) which undermine any assumptions made on continued resource availability. This thesis focuses on building such a QoS-Supportive system for reliably multicasting messages within a group of crash-prone nodes connected by loss-prone networks. System design involves developing a Reliable Multicast protocol and analytically estimating the multicast performance in terms of protocol parameters. It considers two cases regarding message size: small messages that fit into a single packet and large ones that need to be fragmented into multiple packets. Analytical estimations are obtained through stochastic modelling and approximation, and their accuracy is demonstrated using simulations. They allow the affordability of the requested QoS to be numerically assessed for a given set of performance metrics of the underlying network, and also indicate the values to be used for the protocol parameters if the affordable QoS is to be achieved. System implementation takes a modular approach and the major sub-systems built include: the QoS negotiation component, the network monitoring component and the reliable multicast protocol component. Two prototypes have been built. The first one is built as a middleware system in itself to the extent of testing our ideas over a group of geographically distant nodes using PlanetLab. The second prototype is developed as a part of the JGroups Reliable Communication Toolkit and provides, besides an example of scenario directly benefitting of such technology, an example integration of our subsystem into an already-existing system.