User-Space Communication: A Quantitative Study

Modern high speed local area networks offer great potential for communication intensive applications, but their performance is limited by the use of traditional communication protocols, such as TCP/IP. In most cases, these protocols require that all network access be through the operating system, which adds significant overhead to both the transmission path (typically a system call and data copy) and the receive path (typically an interrupt, a system call, and a data copy). To address this performance problem, several user level communication architectures have been developed that remove the operating system from the critical communication path. The article describes six important issues to consider in designing communication protocols for user level architectures. The issues discussed focus on the performance and semantics of a communication system. These issues include data transfer, address translation, protection, and control transfer mechanisms, as well as the issues of reliability and multicast. To provide a basis for analyzing these issues, the authors present a simple network interface protocol for Myricom's Myrinet network, which has a programmable network interface. Researchers can thus explore many protocol design options, and several groups have designed communication systems for Myrinet. The authors refer to 11 such systems, all of which differ significantly in how they resolve these design issues but all of which aim for high performance and provide a lean, low level, and more or less generic communication facility.

The overhead of copying data through the central processor by a message passing protocol limits data transfer bandwidth. If the network interface directly transfers the user's memory to the network by issuing DMA, such data copies may be eliminated. Since the DMA facility accesses the physical memory address space, user virtual memory must be pinned down to a physical memory location before the message is sent or received. If each message transfer involves pin-down and release kernel primitives, message transfer bandwidth will decrease since those primitives are quite expensive. The authors propose a zero copy message transfer with a pin-down cache technique which reuses the pinned-down area to decrease the number of calls to pin-down and release primitives. The proposed facility has been implemented in the PM low-level communication library on the RWC PC Cluster II, consisting of 64 Pentium Pro 200 MHz CPUs connected by a Myricom Myrinet network, and running NetBSD. The PM achieves 108.8 MBytes/sec for a 100% pin-down cache hit ratio and 78.7 MBytes/sec for all pin-down cache miss. The MPI library has been implemented on top of PM. According to the NAS parallel benchmarks result, an application is still better performance in case that cache miss ratio is very high.

We present a control plane architecture to enable software-addressable optical acceleration from the application layer. The architecture is experimentally examined on a cluster-computing test-bed by enabling physical layer optical multicasting on-demand for the application layer to achieve non-blocking performance.

Recent advances in commodity network interface technology enable scientists and engineers to build clusters of workstations or PCs to execute parallel applications. However, raw-hardware network performance is rarely delivered to applications because of the overheads of communication software and operating systems. To reduce these overheads, a technique called user-level communication can be used to allow applications to access the network interface directly without intervention from the operating system. We examine two user-level communication systems, GM and BIP, on alpha based systems connected by a Myrinet network. In addition quantitative studies on how DMA initiation costs, flow control and reliable communication will effect the performance of communication software are presented.

Efficient parallel processing on low-cost clusters with GAMMA active ports

Aggregation protocols allow for distributed lightweight computations deployed on ad-hoc networks in a peer-to-peer fashion. Due to reliance on wireless technology, the communication medium is often hostile which makes such protocols susceptible to correctness and performance issues. In this paper, we study the behavior of aggregation protocols when subject to communication failures: message loss, duplication, and network partitions. We show that resolving communication failures at the communication layer, through a simple reliable communication layer, reduces the overhead of using alternative fault tolerance techniques at upper layers, and also preserves the original accuracy and simplicity of protocols. The empirical study we drive shows that tradeoffs exist across various aggregation protocols, and there is no one-size-fits-all protocol.

This paper is eligible for the student paper award. Molecular communication between biological entities is a new paradigm in communications. Recently, we studied molecular communication between two nodes formed from synthetic bacteria. Due to high randomness in behavior of bacteria, we used a population of them in each node. The reliability of such communication systems depends on both the maximum concentration of molecules that a transmitter node is able to produce at the receiver node as well as the number of bacteria in each nodes. This maximum concentration of molecules falls with distance which makes the communication to the far nodes nearly impossible. In order to alleviate this problem, in this paper, we propose to use a molecular relaying node. The relay node can resend the message either by the different or the same type of molecules as the original signal from the transmitter. We study two scenarios of relaying. In the first scenario, the relay node simply senses the received concentration and forwards it to the receiver. We show that this sense and forward scenario, depending on the type of molecules used for relaying, results in either increasing the range of concentration of molecules at the receiver or increasing the effective number of bacteria in the receiver node. For both cases of sense and forward relaying, we obtain the resulting improvement in channel capacity. We conclude that multi-type molecular relaying outperforms the single-type relaying. In the second scenario, we study the decode and forward relaying for the M-ary signaling scheme. We show that this relaying strategy increases the reliability of M-ary communication significantly.

The vast bulk of underwater communication research has focused on acoustic communication. High propagation delays, extremely low data rates, and very environment-dependent channel behavior are among issues that acoustic communication encounters. To solve these flaws, magnetic induction is proposed as a viable communication paradigm for underwater applications in this paper. All research obstacles in this area are described, according to this. Underwater MI communications are fundamentally distinct from traditional underwater communication paradigms, which depend on electromagnetic, acoustic, or optical waves to convey information between transmitting and receiving parties. MI-based underwater communications have a number of unique and promising characteristics, including low signal propagation delay, reliable and consistent channel behaviour, a sufficiently long communication range with high bandwidth, and the ability to operate silently and stealthily underwater. This article presents the foundations of underwater MI communications, including MI channel models, MI networking protocols design, and MI-based underwater localization, in order to fully use the promise aspects of MI-based communications under water.

By leveraging the 5G enabled V2X networks, the vehicles connected by cellular base-stations can support a wide variety of computation-intensive services. In order to solve the arisen challenges in end-to-end low-latency transmission and backhaul resources, mobile edge computing (MEC) is now regarded as a promising paradigm for 5G-V2X communications. Considering the importance of both reliability and delay in vehicle communication, this article innovatively envisions a joint computation and URLLC resource allocation strategy for collaborative MEC assisted cellular-V2X networks and formulate a jointly power consumption optimization problem while guaranteeing the network stability. To solve this NP hard problem, we decouple it into two sub-problems: URLLC resource allocation for multi-cells to multi-vehicles and computation resource decisions among local vehicle, serving MEC server and collaborative MEC server. Secondly, non-cooperative game and bipartite graph are introduced to reduce the inter-cell interference and decide the channel allocation, which aims to maximize the throughput with a guarantee of reliability in URLLC V2X communication. Then, an online Lyapunov optimization method is proposed to solve computation resource allocation to get a trade-off between the average weighted power consumption and delay where CPU frequency are calculated using Gauss-Seidel method. Finally, the simulation results demonstrate that our proposed strategy can get better trade-off performance among power consumption, overflow probability and execution delay than the one based on centralized MEC assisted V2X.

Controller area network (CAN) is a fieldbus network suitable for small-scale distributed computer controlled systems (DCCS), being appropriate for sending and receiving short real-time messages at speeds up to 1 Mbit/sec. Several studies are available on how to guarantee the real-time requirements of CAN messages, providing preruntime schedulability conditions to guarantee the real-time communication requirements of DCCS traffic. Usually, it is considered that CAN guarantees atomic multicast properties by means of its extensive error detection/signaling mechanisms. However, there are some error situations where messages can be delivered in duplicate or delivered only by a subset of the receivers, leading to inconsistencies in the supported applications. In order to prevent such inconsistencies, a middleware for reliable communication in CAN is proposed, taking advantage of CAN synchronous properties to minimize the runtime overhead. Such middleware comprises a set of atomic multicast and consolidation protocols, upon which the reliable communication properties are guaranteed. The related timing analysis demonstrates that, in spite of the extra stack of protocols, the real-time properties of CAN are preserved since the predictability of message transfer is guaranteed.

: An important function of communication networks is to implement reliable data transfer over an unreliable underlying network. Formal specifications are given for reliable and unreliable communication layers, in terms of I/O automata. Based on these specifications, it is proved that no reliable communication protocol can tolerate crashes of the processors on which the protocol runs.

As functionality of vehicles increases in complexity, the demand on the in-vehicle networks increases as well. Maximum bus utilization often becomes the communication bottleneck. One way to satisfy the high bandwidth requirement for future vehicles is to use a higher bandwidth bus or multiple buses. However, the use of a higher bandwidth bus increases the cost of the network. Similarly, the use of multiple buses increases the cost as well as the complexity of wiring and network handling. Both options are becoming solutions to high bandwidth demand. An alternative option is the development of a higher layer protocol that uses data-reduction (DR) techniques to reduce the amount of data to be transferred. Its goal is to communicate the same amount of information using less bus bandwidth. It would be acceptable, provided that it does not increase the message latencies significantly so that the safety of the vehicle is not compromised. The cost of the protocol is expected to be marginal because it consists of one-time changes to software. Various DR algorithms are available in the literature, but DR technology has not been introduced in in-vehicle protocol standards. This paper presents a unique DR methodology, along with its comparison with other proposed methodologies. The performance of this new DR algorithm is found to be better than that of the existing DR algorithms for a wide range of signal dynamics. The cost, as well as the impact of this protocol on the end-to-end message latency, has been found to be very marginal.

<div class="htmlview paragraph">The demand for drive-by-wire, pre-crash warning and many other new features will require high bandwidth from the future in-vehicle networks. One way to satisfy the high bandwidth requirement of future vehicles is to use a higher bandwidth bus or multiple busses. However, the use of a higher bandwidth bus will increase the cost of the network. Similarly, the use of multiple buses will increase cost as well as the complexity of wiring. Thus, neither option is a viable solution. Another option could be the development of a higher layer protocol to reduce the amount of data to be transferred. The higher layer protocol could be acceptable provided it does not increase the message latencies. The cost of implementing the protocol will be marginal because it can be done by making changes in software. Various data reduction protocols are available in the literature. We have made changes in the existing data reduction protocols to improve the performance of the protocol. Our paper will explain the improved protocol in detail and compare its performance with that of other protocols. The performance of our protocol will be shown in terms of message latency, message throughput and bus utilization.</div>

Molecular communication is a new communication paradigm that allows nanomachines to communicate using biological mechanisms and/or components to transfer information (e.g., molecular diffusion, molecular motors). One possible approach for molecular communication is through the use of virus particles that act as carriers for nucleic acid-based information. This paper analyzes multihop molecular nanonetworks that utilize virus particles as information carrier. The analysis examines the physiochemical and biological characteristics of virus particles such as diffusion, absorption, and decay, and how they affect the reliability of multihop communication in molecular nanonetworks. The paper also analyzes the use of a simple implicit acknowledgement protocol for a single-path topology, and compare its performance to defined and random multipath topologies that do not use acknowledgments. Numerical results show that commensurate reliability is achievable for single-path with implicit acknowledgement and multipath topologies. However, the single-path topology exhibits increased communication delay and more uncertain end-to-end communication time.

The smart grid is equipped with bi-directional information flow between its devices, aiming at automation, improved stability, resilience, and robust security. However, enabling effective and reliable communication in a smart grid is a challenging task. The majority of the proposed networking architectures fall short in addressing the key aspects of smart grid communication, including device heterogeneity, protocols and standards interoperability, and particularly application qualityof-service (QoS) requirements. In this paper, we propose iCAAP, an information-centric, QoSaware network architecture that aims to satisfy the low latency, high bandwidth, and high reliability requirements of smart grid communications. In iCAAP, we categorize smart grid traffic (emanating from diverse applications) into three priority classes to enable preferential treatment of traffic flows. Our simulation results demonstrate the higher scalability of iCAAP in satisfying the stringent requirements of high priority traffic compared to the state-of-the-art.