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DAILY NEWS AND INFORMATION
FOR THE GLOBAL GRID COMMUNITY /
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Special Features:
FLOW-BASED ROUTING BREAKTHROUGH
DEMONSTRATED
NTT Network Innovation Laboratories, a research division of Nippon
Telephone
&
Telegraph (NTT), in collaboration with the University of Illinois-Chicago
(UIC) and the University of Tokyo, demonstrated innovative new IP network
congestion control capabilities based on the latest generation flow-based
routing technology.
In a workshop hosted by the UIC Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL),
NTT
showed its MaXimal Queuing (MXQ) algorithm to leading network academics, and
demonstrated its effectiveness at preventing congestion in highly-utilized
networks.
EVL's TeraVision was used to send three high-resolution video streams to a
super-high-definition tiled display, while an Access Grid distributed video
conferencing system also ran over the MXQ-enabled network. Attendees, some of
whom participated via the Access Grid, were shown the signal degradation
inherent in times of network congestion using conventional IP/MPLS routers,
then the elimination of this congestion with new flow-based Caspian Apeiro
routers incorporating NTT's MXQ algorithm.
In flow-based networking, packets are routed as whole flows, i.e. streams
of
related packets, rather than as individual packets as in current IP/MPLS
networks. The unique level of data obtained in flow-based routing, such as
flow length, rate, delay variation and other parameters, enable a number of
new network benefits.
"NTT's MXQ flow-based control mechanism arbitrates flows based on their
sending rate," said Takashi Shimizu of NTT Laboratories. "When congestion
occurs, MXQ helps routers intelligently discard (or delay where possible)
packets from higher rate flows. This allows the protection of smaller-rate
flows and improves utilization of the network. This sort of congestion control
intelligence is only possible in a flow-based environment, where routers know
which packets belong to which flow."
"MXQ's arbitration of flows according to their sending rate was achieved
under
realistic conditions using a combination of TeraVision streams to a
30-megapixel GeoWall-2 tiled LCD display, and Access Grid video conferencing,"
said Professor Jason Leigh of EVL. "Caspian's MXQ implementation worked very
well, even under real-world traffic."
Today's demonstrations were part of the ON*VECTOR Advanced Networking
Workshop, hosted at UIC/EVL, which focused on new flow-based networking
techniques to improve QoS and enable better service models for IP-based
telecommunications. They were the result of ongoing collaboration among NTT
Labs, UIC/EVL and University of Tokyo. Four months of testbed experiments,
conducted with the cooperation and technical support of Caspian Networks and
NTT Communications, allowed researchers to gather experimental data on
flow-based networking using the high-performance computational, networking and
visualization infrastructure developed at EVL.
Additional demonstrations by the University of Tokyo and Caspian Networks
further illustrated the benefits of flow-based networking, including
peer-to-peer traffic identification and control, as well as denial-of-service
prevention.
Workshop participants included attendees from UIC, NTT Laboratories, NTT
America, NTT Communications, the University of Tokyo, Caspian Networks,
Northwestern University and Argonne National Laboratory.
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