M.Sc. Tatiana Polishchuk will defend her doctoral thesis Enabling Multipath and Multicast Data Transmission in Legacy and Future Internet on Monday 9th of September 2013 at noon in the University of Helsinki Main Building, Unioninkatu 34, Auditorium XII (old part), 3rd floor. Her opponent is Chief Researcher Bob Briscoe (Brittish Telecom, UK) and custos Professor Jussi Kangasharju (University of Helsinki). The defense will be held in English.

Enabling Multipath and Multicast Data Transmission in Legacy and Future Internet

The quickly growing community of Internet users is requesting multiple applications and services. At the same time the structure of the network is changing. From the performance point of view, there is a tight interplay between the application and the network design. The network must be constructed to provide an adequate performance of the target application.

In this thesis we consider how to improve the quality of users' experience concentrating on two popular and resource-consuming applications: bulk data transfer and real-time video streaming. We share our view on the techniques which enable feasibility and deployability of the network functionality leading to unquestionable performance improvement for the corresponding applications.

Modern mobile devices, equipped with several network interfaces, as well as multihomed residential Internet hosts are capable of maintaining multiple simultaneous attachments to the network. We propose to enable simultaneous multipath data transmission in order to increase throughput and speed up such bandwidth-demanding applications as, for example, le download. We design an extension for Host Identity Protocol (mHIP), and propose a multipath data scheduling solution on a wedge layer between IP and transport, which effectively distributes packets from a TCP connection over available paths. We support our protocol with a congestion control scheme and prove its ability to compete in a friendly manner against the legacy network protocols. Moreover, applying game-theoretic analytical modelling we investigate how the multihomed HIP multipath-enabled hosts coexist in the shared network.

The number of real-time applications grows quickly. Efficient and reliable transport of multimedia content is a critical issue of today's IP network design. In this thesis we solve scalability issues of the multicast dissemination trees controlled by the hybrid error correction. We propose a scalable multicast architecture for potentially large overlay networks. Our techniques address suboptimality of the adaptive hybrid error correction (AHEC) scheme in the multicast scenarios. A hierarchical multi-stage multicast tree topology is constructed in order to improve the performance of AHEC and guarantee QoS for the multicast clients. We choose an evolutionary networking approach that has the potential to lower the required resources for multimedia applications by utilizing the error-correction domain separation paradigm in combination with selective insertion of the supplementary data from parallel networks, when the corresponding content is available.

Clearly both multipath data transmission and multicast content dissemination are the future Internet trends. We study multiple problems related to the deployment of these methods.

Availability of the dissertation

An electronic version of the doctoral dissertation is available on the e-thesis site of the University of Helsinki at http://urn.fi/URN:ISBN:978-952-10-9007-3.

Printed copies are available on request from the research coordinator of the department (researchcoordinator@cs.helsinki.fi) or from Tatiana Polishchuk (tatiana.polishchuk@hiit.fi.).