Until there is greater consensus on proposals for realizing better-than-best-effort services on the Internet, developers of multimedia and distributed virtual environment applications must rely on best-effort media adaptations to ameliorate the effects of network congestion. We present the results of a study on the use of adaptations originally developed for audio and video applications for the data-flows generated by the UNC nanoManipulator. The nanoManipulator is a virtual environment interface to a scanned-probe microscope that has been used by scientists as a tool for basic research in the material and biological sciences. We are building a distributed version of the system for operation over the Internet and are investigating media adaptations for realizing application performance requirements. The results of early experiments with audio and video-centric media adaptations applied to the flows generated by a microscope and a haptic force feedback device are promising. A simple forward error correction scheme provides good recovery from packet loss and an elastic display-queue management scheme limits the impact of delay- jitter and results in more continuous playout of media samples. These preliminary results provide evidence that a sophisticated virtual environment interface can operate over modest distances over the Internet to control a remote microscope in real-time.
The Internet research community is promoting active queue management in routers as a proactive means of addressing congestion in the Internet. Active queue management mechanisms such as Random Early Detection (RED) work well for TCP flows but can fail in the presence of unresponsive UDP flows. Recent proposals extend RED to strongly favor TCP and TCP-like flows and to actively penalize `misbehaving' flows. This is problematic for multimedia flows that, although potentially well-behaved, do not, or can not, satisfy the definition of a TCP-like flow. In this paper we investigate an extension to RED active queue management called Class-Based Thresholds (CBT). The goal of CBT is to reduce congestion in routers and to protect TCP from all UDP flows while also ensuring acceptable throughput and latency for well-behaved UDP flows. CBT attempts to realize a `better than best effort' service for well-behaved multimedia flows that is comparable to that achieved by a packet or link scheduling discipline, however, CBT does this by queue management rather than by scheduling. We present results of experiments comparing our mechanisms to plain RED and to FRED, a variant of RED designed to ensure fair allocation of bandwidth amongst flows. We also compare CBT to a packet scheduling scheme. The experiments show that CBT (1) realizes protection for TCP, and (2) provides throughput and end-to-end latency for tagged UDP flows, that is better than that under FRED and RED and comparable to that achieved by packet scheduling. Moreover CBT is a lighter-weight mechanism than FRED in terms of its state requirements and implementation complexity.
We describe anew framework for resource allocation that unifies the well-known proportional share and resource reservation policies. Each client is characterized by two parameters: a weight that represents the rate at which the client 'pays' for the resource, and a share that represents the fraction of the resource that the client should receive. A fixed rate corresponds to a proportional share allocation, while a fixed share corresponds to a reservation. Furthermore, rates and shares are duals of each other. Once one parameters is fixed the other becomes fixed as well. If a client asks for a fixed share then the level of competition for the resource determines the rate at which it has to pay, while if the rate is fixed, level of competition determines the service time the clients should receive. To implement this framework we use a new proportional share algorithm, called earliest eligible virtual deadline first, that achieves optical accuracy in the rates at which process execute. This makes it possible to provide support for highly predictable, real-time services. As a proof of concept we have implemented a prototype of a CPU scheduler under the FreeBSD operating system. The experimental results show that our scheduler achieves the goal of providing integrated support for batch and real-time applications.
We have constructed a proof-of-principle system called the repository for patterned injury data (RPID) for supporting collaborative forensic medicine. The early RPID prototype is built on ABC/DGS, a graph-server and collaborative hypermedia system built in the UNC Collaboratory. ABC provides collaboration services for work groups via shared artifacts, giving common views of the information and allowing conferencing over the data. A second prototype is underway that has more flexible control of multiperson creation of, and access to, the shared patient data and pathology artifacts. We conclude by describing a planned third prototype, to be built not on ABC, but on a modification of the WWW httpd distribution data server.
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