Contributions to Mechanisms for Adaptive Use of Mobile Network Resources Olivier Mehani To cite this version: Olivier Mehani. Contributions to Mechanisms for Adaptive Use of Mobile Network Resources. Au- tomatic. École Nationale Supérieure des Mines de Paris; University of New South Wales - Australie, 2011. English. NNT : 2011ENMP0096. pastel-00711154 HAL Id: pastel-00711154 https://pastel.archives-ouvertes.fr/pastel-00711154 Submitted on 22 Jun 2012 HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci- destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents entific research documents, whether they are pub- scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, lished or not. 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INSTITUT DES SCIENCES ET TECHNOLOGIES École doctorale n◦432 : SMI—Sciences des métiers de l’ingénieur Doctorat ParisTech THÈSE pour obtenir le grade de docteur délivré par l’École nationale supérieure des mines de Paris en cotutelle avec School of Electrical Engineering and Telecommunications University of New South Wales, Australie Spécialité « Informatique temps-réel, robotique et automatique » présentée et soutenue publiquement par Olivier Mehani le 14 décembre 2011 Contributions aux mécanismes de réseau pour un usage adaptatif des ressources mobiles Direction de la thèse: Roksana Boreli Arnaud de La Fortelle Encadrement de la thèse: Thierry Ernst Jury Christian Bonnet, Professeur, EURECOM Rapporteur Roksana Boreli, Chercheuse, NICTA Examinatrice Thierry Ernst, Chercheur, Mines ParisTech Examinateur T Arnaud de La Fortelle, Professeur, Mines ParisTech Examinateur François Spies, Professeur, Université de Franche-Comté Président H Andreas Timm-Giel, Professeur, Hamburg University of Technology Rapporteur È MINES ParisTech S Dép. Mathématiques et Systèmes—Centre de Robotique 60, Boulevard Saint-Michel 75272 PARIS cedex 06 E Contributions to Mechanisms for Adaptive Use of Mobile Network Resources Olivier Mehani A dissertation submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy The School of Electrical Engineering and Telecommunications The University of New South Wales in a cotutelle agreement with D´ep. Math´ematiques et Syst`emes—Centre de Robotique Ecole´ Nationale Sup´erieure des Mines–ParisTech, France 14 December 2011 Acknowledgements I would first like to thank my supervisors, Roksana Boreli, Thierry Ernst, Arnaud de La Fortelle and Aruna Seneviratne for their support throughout my work on this thesis. Rok- sana has been a great help while refining and expressing the ideas presented in this thesis, while Thierry’s input put them into different and wider perspectives. Arnaud accepted to supervise me for Mines–ParisTech which allowed me to work in this international col- laboration context, and Aruna was a strong support at NICTA without whom coming to Australia and securing (and extending) my scholarship would have been much harder. I am grateful to NICTA and Inria, which have financially supported my doctoral studies, and provided a most adequate work environment throughout my research. I am also very thankful to Christine at Ecole´ des Mines, Victoria at UNSW, Rema at NICTA and Chantal at Inria for their help making all administrative hurdles vanish almost magically. This thesis has benefited at all stages from my interactions with many people. I am ex- tremely grateful to Guillaume J. who has been a constant support in many ways (ideas, advice, proofreading and beers) throughout these four years. It was also very insightful to work on research papers with my various co-authors (amongst others and in no partic- ular order, Jolyon, Michael and Thierry R.). Rodrigo’s advice, even before I started my thesis, has helped me structure my work into something hopefully more coherent. Finally, I extend my gratitude to all the other people I had the opportunity to meet, both in NICTA’s Network Research Group (particularly those who willingly exposed themselves to proofreading drafts of this dissertation: Guillaume S., Babil, Yan and Mentari) and Inria’s Imara project-team (Armand, Laurent, Fran¸cois, Cl´ement) for making these labs exciting places to work, learn and develop new ideas. Finally, I would like to thank my parents, who have always been very supportive, even when some decisions did not seem to be the most optimal at the time, or when some others would take me geographically further and further away from them. I also thank Jenny, for her constant support, understanding, and everything else. Moreover, without her, the word “quintessential” would not have appeared in this dissertation. iii Abstract With the widespread availability of multiple wireless network technologies, mobile com- puting devices can benefit from almost uninterrupted connectivity by changing network attachments as they move. This however raises the problem of the selection method to be used for the choice of the wireless networks to associate with, in order to provide the best performance. Moreover, mobility events may result in poor application quality, due to either a disruption in connectivity during the handover or the heterogeneity of the charac- teristic of different access networks. To address these problems, this thesis introduces and studies all three elements (observation, decision, action) of a control framework to enable better use of available network resources. We first show that a decision mechanism which directly considers the relevant user- and application-centric metrics is more appropriate than using the common network metrics- based indirect approach. This mechanism is used to control the entire network stack of the mobile node in a coordinated way, rather than individual components, to avoid potentially conflicting combinations. Our results indicate that, by exploiting the flexibility of application parameters, it is possible to maintain high application quality while reducing both the power consumption and access price. We then introduce a mobility-aware extension to the TCP-Friendly Rate Control mechan- ism (TFRC), as an action element, to address the disruption in connectivity resulting from the mobility events. We propose to suspend the transmission before disconnections and to probe the network after reconnections. Simulations demonstrate how this enables faster recovery after disconnected periods as well as a significantly improved adaptation to the newly available network conditions. When used with the Datagram Congestion Control Protocol (DCCP), experiments show that it provides better support for real-time applica- tions for which the user-perceived quality is very dependent on the immediate transmission rate. Finally, we present an experimental process to evaluate the OMF Measurement Library (OML), a lightweight instrumentation and reporting tool which we propose to use as the observation element of our framework. We show that this library does not significantly impact the performance of the instrumented applications, while accurately reporting the observed metrics. Keywords network mobility, communication stack, cross-layer framework, optimisation, quality of experience, transport protocol. v R´esum´e Avec les larges d´eploiements de multiples technologies sans fil, les terminaux informatiques mobiles b´en´eficient d’une connectivit´epresque permanente, changeant de r´eseaux d’acc`es au gr´ede leurs d´eplacements. Ceci pose cependant le probl`eme de la s´election de ces r´eseaux, afin de fournir les meilleures performances. Cette mobilit´erisque aussi d’impacter la qualit´edes applications, souvent lors des « handovers » d’un r´eseau `al’autre, ou en raison de la disparit´edes caract´eristiques des r´eseaux d’acc`es. Pour aborder ces probl`emes, cette th`ese introduit et ´evalue trois ´el´ements de contrˆole (observation, d´ecision, action) permettant une meilleure utilisation des ressources r´eseau par les ´equipements mobiles. Nous montrons d’abord qu’un m´ecanisme de d´ecision qui utilise directement les m´etriques pertinentes pour les utilisateurs et les applications est plus appropri´eque l’approche indi- recte classique bas´ee sur les m´etriques r´eseau. Ce m´ecanisme contrˆole de mani`ere coordon- n´ee l’ensemble de la pile protocolaire, plutˆotque des composants s´epar´es, afin d’´eviter des combinaisons conflictuelles. Nous d´emontrons que la flexibilit´edes param`etres applicatifs peut ˆetre exploit´ee et permet de maintenir une qualit´e´elev´ee pour les applications tout en r´eduisant les coˆuts d’acc`es (´energ´etique et financier). Une extension au TCP-Friendly Rate Control mechanism (TFRC) est ensuite introduite, en tant qu’´el´ement d’action, pour att´enuer les perturbations lors des handovers. Nous proposons de suspendre la transmission avant la d´econnexion, puis de sonder le r´eseau apr`es reconnexion. Nous montrons que cela permet un r´etablissement plus rapide et une meilleure adaptabilit´eaux conditions du nouveau r´eseau. Son usage en combinaison avec le Datagram Congestion Control Protocol (DCCP) offre un meilleur support aux applications temps-r´eel, dont la qualit´ed´epend de la vitesse de transmission imm´ediate. Finalement, nous pr´esentons une m´ethode pour ´evaluer la OMF Measurement Library (OML), une biblioth`eque d’instrumentation dont nous proposons l’usage comme ´el´ement d’observation.