Guest Editorial Protocol Architectures For 21st Century ... - IEEE Xplore

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IEEE JOURNAL ON SELECTED AREAS IN COMMUNICATIONS, VOL. 16, NO. 3, APRIL 1998

Guest Editorial Protocol Architectures for 21st Century Applications I. AIMS

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HIS issue came about partly as a result of the interests of the Guest Editors, who are also partners in the European Esprit Project HIPPARCH (High Performance Protocol Architectures). That project is concerned with the fast-changing world of data networking, which appears to be subsuming all other types of networking. This rapid change challenges many of the base assumptions in the protocol architectures that have traditionally been used for the design of data networks. First, as stated in the Call for Papers for this issue, advances in high-speed networking and computing have led to a diversification of distributed applications ranging from distributed hypermedia systems such as WWW, through to interactive multimedia conferencing systems. Second, underlying transmission technology has not simply speeded up, but a broader range of performance characteristics must now be subsumed within any communications system: nomadic, wireless, high speed, best effort and guaranteed Internet, B-ISDN, and other services are all available. Multicast group communication in the local and wide area is often possible. Third, advances in specification languages, implementation languages, and compiler techniques should be accommodated in new architectures. Existing communications architectures such as the ISO’s OSI and the Internet model, as well as traditional telecommunications systems designs, fall short of providing a framework for designing and implementing complete systems for supporting novel applications in this new world. A number of ad hoc techniques have emerged beyond simple layered models of protocols that help structure open communications systems that are flexible (to allow for new services and applications) and efficient (to take advantage of increased performance, but not incur to much overhead at the low-speed or high-delay and error-rate end of the spectrum). Automatic or semiautomatic techniques (protocol graph relinking, stack and configuration specification languages, and so on) are emerging as a possible path forward. In this issue, an extraordinary diversity of submissions showed us that all is alive and well in the world of architectural research. Indeed, the ubiquity of networks and computers has led to more and more problems being uncovered and a requirement for more and more imagination in solving these problems. The papers accepted for this issue (and most of the 50 or so submissions) fall very roughly under four headings. 1) Classic “HIPPARCH” work on application layer framing (ALF) and integrated layer processing (ILP). 2) Applications—in particular, problems with data distribution in the Internet and particularly in the World Wide Publisher Item Identifier S 0733-8716(98)00648-9.

Web—have led to a great deal of work on distribution protocols and systems design for caching and for multicast distribution. 3) QoS Support in Internet and Distributed Systems: The massive take-up of the Internet has also led to attempts to deploy multimedia applications. Here, recent work in the research and standards (IETF) communities has led to some semitraditional solutions. 4) Intelligent Telecommunications Systems Engineering: Capitalizing on the experiences in the Internet, of smart protocols operating in the network, a number of people have revolutionized the approaches to signaling and other types of intelligence typically implemented as monolithic processes within switches and exchanges, really using HIPPARCH-type approaches, but applied to the signaling systems rather than the data or media protocols themselves. An exciting new area which has provoked not a little controversy is that of “active networks,” which represent a logical extreme of this approach. II. THE PAPERS We finally accepted ten papers for the issue, as follows. • “The Applicability of Integrated Layer Processing,” by Bengt Ahlgren of SICS and Mats Bj¨orkman and Per Gunningberg of Uppsala University. This paper presents a detailed analysis of the performance of ILP in different protocol scenarios and shows where it is and is not useful. • “An ALF Communication Architecture: Design and Automated Implementation,” by Isabelle Chrisment, Delphine Kaplan, and Christophe Diot of INRIA Sophia Antipolis. In this paper, a system for the automated generation of communications code that supports ALF is presented. • “ICP and the Squid Web Cache,” by Duane Wessels and K. Claffy of the National Laboratory for Applied Network Research. In this paper, the latest addition to the World Wide Web family of protocols, the Inter-Cache Protocol, is presented and analyzed. • “An Adaptive Network Prefetch Scheme,” by Zhimei Jiang and Leonard Kleinrock of the Department of Computer Science, University of California, Los Angeles. Currently, many sites prefer Web accesses to be carried via proxy caching servers (perhaps organized in a national or provider-wide hierarchy using ICP). These caches are currently demand fetched only. In this paper, the advantages of cache prefetching are thoroughly explored. • “Evaluating the Performance of Flood-d: A Tool for Efficiently Replicating Internet Information Services,” by Katia Obraczka and Peter B. Danzig of the Information Science Institute/University of Southern California. This

0733–8716/98$10.00  1998 IEEE

IEEE JOURNAL ON SELECTED AREAS IN COMMUNICATIONS, VOL. 16, NO. 3, APRIL 1998

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paper looks at a scheme for the dissemiantion of data to replicated services, complementing the previous two papers. “A Time-Efficient Architecture for Multimedia Applications,” by Philippe Owezarski, Michel Diaz, and Christophe Chassot of the Laboratoire d’Analyze et d’Architecture des Systemes, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, LAAS-CNRS. In this paper, a form of timed Petri nets is used to analyze multimedia application performance requirements. “Design and Implementation of an RSVP-Based Quality of Service Architecture for an Integrated Services Internet,” by Tsipora P. Barzilai, Dilip D. Kandlur, Ashish Mehra, and Debanjan Saha of IBM T. J. Watson Research Center. This paper presents a state-of-the-art integrated services Internet implementation, incorporating a number of underlying link technologies. “Controlling the Tempest: Adaptive Management in Advanced ATM Control Architectures,” by David A. Halls and Sean G. Rooney of the University of Cambridge Computer Lab. This paper, together with the next, represents the state-of-the-art in intelligent approaches to signaling. “Service-Specific Control Architectures for ATM,” by Jacobus E. van der Merwe and Ian M. Leslie of the University of Cambridge, Computer Lab. “Protocol Boosters,” by D. C. Feldmeir, A. J. McAuley of Bellcore, J. M. Smith of the University of Pennsylvania, D. S. Bakin, W. S. Marcus, and T. M. Raleigh of Bellcore.

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This last paper covers a new research area in which the authors have been leading lights, which is based around the ideas of active networks: placing ever more intelligence into active software components within the routing and switching elements of the network, we can get some remarkable performance improvements in some situations. JON CROWCROFT, Guest Editor UCL London WC1E 6BT U.K. CHRISTOPHE DIOT, Guest Editor INRIA Sophia Antipolis, 2004 France PER G. GUNNINGBERG, Guest Editor Polacksbacken Uppsala S-751 05 Sweden MIKE FRY, Guest Editor University of Technology Sydney, NSW 2007 Australia ARUNA SENEVIRATNE, Guest Editor University of Technology Sidney, NSW 2007 Australia S. MCDONALD, JSAC Board Representative

Jon Crowcroft (SM’95) graduated in physics from Trinity College, Cambridge University, U.K., in 1979 and received the M.Sc. degree in computing in 1981 and the Ph.D. degree in 1993. He is a Professor of Networked Systems in the Department of Computer Science, University College London, where he is responsible for a number of European- and U.S.-funded research projects in multimedia communications. He has been working in these areas for over 15 years. Dr. Crowcroft is a member of the ACM, the British Computer Society, and the IEE. He is General Chair for the ACM SIGCOMM. He is also on the editorial team for the ACM/IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON NETWORKING. With Mark Handley, he is the coauthor of WWW: Beneath the Surf (UCL Press, 1995); he also authored Open Distributed Systems (UCL Press, 1995).

Christophe Diot received the Ph.D. degree in computer science from INP Grenoble in 1991. He is a Research Scientist at INRIA Sophia Antipolis, working on new architectures for communication subsystems (design of communication support for time-constrained multimedia applications, implementation of adaptive applications). Dr. Diot was also the General Chairman of ACM SIGCOMM97, held in Cannes in September 1997.

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IEEE JOURNAL ON SELECTED AREAS IN COMMUNICATIONS, VOL. 16, NO. 3, APRIL 1998

Per G. Gunningberg (S’79–M’83) received the M.Sc. degree from the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1981 and the Ph.D. degree from Uppsala University in 1983. He was a Researcher in the Swedish Institute of Computer Science, and is now an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Systems, Uppsala University, Sweden, which he joined in 1995. He has also been a Visiting Assistant Professor at the UCLA Computer Science Department for one and a half years. His interests include protocol implementations, distributed operating systems, and dependable computing.

Mike Fry received the B.A. (Hons.) degree from Cambridge University, the M.Sc. degree from Imperial College London, and the Ph.D. degree from the University of Sydney. He is the Dean of the Faculty of Mathematical and Computing Sciences, University of Technology, Sydney, Australia. In his spare time, he engages in research projects in distributed multimedia systems, high-performance protocol architectures, and mobile protocol stacks.

Aruna Seneviratne received the B.Sc. (Hons.) degree in electronic engineering from Middlesex Polytechnic and the Ph.D. degree from the University of Bath. He has worked in industry as well as academia, both in the United Kingdom and Australia. He has also held visiting appointments at the University of Pierre Marie Curie, France, and INRIA, France. He is currently an Associate Professor and is the Director of the Telecommunications Program at University of Technology, Sydney. His research interest are in the area of end-to-end QoS management, high-performance protocol architectures, and mobile computing systems.