International Journal of Engineering Trends and Technology (IJETT) - Volume4 Issue6- June 2013

Proposal of NS2 Simulation Based Study of IP Multimedia Applications on IEEE 802.11 Based Network Comprising Virtual Server Arrays
Dr.V.Karthikeyani1
1 2

Mr.T.Thiruvenkadam2

Asst.Professor, Department of Computer Science, Thiruvalluvar Govt., Arts College, Rasipuram. Asst.Professor, Department of Computer Science, K.S.Rangasamy College of Arts and Science, Tiruchengode. protocol. Today, IEEE 802.11 can be considered wireless version of Ethernet by virtue of supporting best report service (not guaranteeing any service level to users/applications). For different type of applications, there are different requirements for the Quality of Service (QoS). For example, real-time applications such as voice and video are delay sensitive. However the delay is not critical for non real-time applications such as File Transfer and some delay can be tolerated. The IEEE 802.11 working group is currently defining new supplement to the existing legacy 802.11 medium access control (MAC) sub-layer in order to support Quality of Service (QoS). Many researchers have been done on the performance analysis of the MAC protocols of IEEE standards, most of them concentrating on the improvement of QoS parameters of wireless networks. But none of them have been concentrating on performance of virtual network since Virtual machine (VM) consolidation has been increasingly adopted in cloud (e.g., Amazon EC2, Eucalyptus and Nimbus), Grid, and datacenter environments. It is necessary to study the performance of IP Multimedia applications on IEEE 802.11-based network comprising virtual server arrays. The remainder of this paper is organized as follows. Section II provides Introduction to wireless networks. Section III describes Overview of virtualization. Section IV presents the research background and context and Section V discusses the future work and finally, section V concludes the paper. II.INTRODUCTION TO WIRELESS NETWORKS The wireless networks are making integrated networks a reality by bringing fundamental changes to data networking, telecommunication. A wireless network enables people to communicate and access applications and information without wires anywhere and anytime. This provides freedom of movement and the ability to extend applications to different areas. Wireless networking has witnessed an explosion of interest from consumers in recent years due to its applications in mobile and personal communications. This network is getting popular nowadays due to easy to setup feature. One can connect computers without the need for wires. All the communication in the world including satellite communication, mobile communication, internet, telephones and WANs is due to the networking. Wireless networks have changed the era of life. Users are happy to get the data on time and without any problem. The use of the authentication and biometrics and other security mechanisms can improve

Abstract
The market for IEEE 802.11 wireless local area networks (WLANs) continues to grow at a rapid pace. Business organizations, educational institutions and universities are value the simplicity and scalability of WLANs as well as the relative ease of integrating wireless access with existing network resources. WLANs support user demand for seamless connectivity, flexibility and mobility. But Current WLAN systems suffer difficulties due to the increasing expectations of end users and unstable bandwidth Delayboundary demands from new higher data rate services, such as high-definition television (HDTV), video teleconferencing, multimedia streaming, voice over IP (VoIP), file transfer, and online gaming. Besides this recently Virtual machine (VM) consolidation has become a common practice in clouds, Grids, and datacenters. While this practice leads to higher CPU utilization, we observe its negative impact on the TCP throughput of the consolidated VMs. As more VMs share the same core/CPU, the CPU scheduling latency for each VM increases significantly. When multimedia applications streaming from this kind of consolidated virtual servers to the WLANs client leads to increase the slower progress. This article provides an overview of wireless networks, the 802.11 WLAN standards and virtualization technologies, followed by a presentation of work planned to identify and analysis the problem and make recommendations for designing optimal WLAN network for streaming multimedia applications for virtual networks to ensure good quality and performance for end users. Keywords: IEEE802.11 Wireless LAN, Medium Access Control (MAC), Quality-of-Service (QoS), DCF, PCF, Virtualization, Server consolidation

I. INTRODUCTION
As usage and deployment of wireless local area networks (WLANs) increases, it is reasonable to anticipate that the demands to be able to run time-bounded applications on them will be comparable as on wired networks. The IEEE 802.11 Wireless Local Area Networks (WLAN) is being deployed widely and rapidly for many different environments, including office, enterprise, home, public access networking. The main characteristics of the 802.11 standards are simplicity and robustness against failures due to the distributed approach of its medium access control (MAC)

ISSN: 2231-5381

http://www.ijettjournal.org

Page 2635

International Journal of Engineering Trends and Technology (IJETT) - Volume4 Issue6- June 2013
the security to some extent. Still Hackers can exploit the sensitive data. The main purpose of the wireless networks is to establish a secure, fast and reliable communicate channel among the people. A. Overview of IEEE 802.11 WLAN Wireless local area network, an emerging and innovative activity in the field of computer networks, supported by flexibility and mobility, in turn attracts the interests of various academia and industry people A wireless network makes its users capable to connect their mobile systems to the enterprise network instantly with an almost effortless approach. One of the main benefits of wireless is its scope to the distant areas where cabling would be costlier and difficult. Mobility remains the most attractive feature of wireless networks which allows its users to move within the network which in turn also attracts wireless internet service providers interest in the exploitation of wireless networks. The most influential factors of wireless networks is the provision of higher data rates, lower packet losses and a fair level of Quality of Services. Different types of traffic flows whether it is data flows or multimedia flows like real time voice, streaming voice, video demands access to high data rates and guaranteed QoS in terms of higher throughput, less delay, less no. of collisions and lower packet losses, whereas achieving these factors is very difficult as wired networks is highly time variant and noisy. These requirements led the engineers of IEEE association to keep on working upon the improvement of WLAN standards so that wireless users can satisfy their usage demands from wireless networks. IEEE 802.11 is the most commonly used standard of WLAN [1]. In time, there has been a tremendous growth in the deployment of WLAN standards; network traffic has also been classified as multitude of classes where each class requires a different level of service from the network. Moreover, invention of time bounded applications like VOIP or video streaming requires hard real time constraints. So, it becomes implied that, the WLAN standards should meet these requirements of service differentiation and prioritization. Unfortunately, IEEE802.11 WLAN standard does not satisfy the constraints of QoS parameters. Therefore, IEEE has evolved with an enhanced version IEEE 802.11e which implements QoS mechanisms to a fair level [3]. Many investigations have been made in the performance of 802.11e standard. IEEE 802.11 working group has enhanced the MAC sub layer of the standard to support the QoS constraints. B. Overview of IEEE 802.11 PHY The IEEE 802.11 PHY layer specification concentrates mainly on wireless transmission. The original specification was first approved in 1997 [1] and includes a primitive MAC architecture and three basic over-the-air communication techniques with maximal raw data rates of 1 and 2 Mb/s. Because of their fairly low data bandwidths, further amendments have been proposed throughout the years: IEEE 802.11a [2], 802.11b [3], and 802.11g [4]. Both 802.11aand 802.11b were finalized in 1999 and support raw data rates up to 11 Mb/s and 54 Mb/s, respectively. In June 2003, a third PHY specification (802.11g) was introduced, with similar maximum raw data rate as 802.11a but operating in separate frequency bands. For this period, there were many amendments and countless research works for improved PHY specifications that mostly aim to provide reliable connections and higher data rates. This is mainly because there is a continuous rapid increase in user demand for faster connections. In spite of establishing novel techniques that theoretically can be used for higher data transmission rates, the throughput outcomes at the MAC data are surprisingly low and in most cases, half of what the underlying PHY rates can offer. C. IEEE 802.11 MAC The MAC architecture is based on the logical coordination functions, which determine who accesses to the wireless medium at each time. In the legacy IEEE 802.11 standard, there are two types of access schemes: the mandatory distributed coordination function (DCF), which is based on the carrier sense multiple access with collision avoidance (CSMA/CA) mechanism; and the optional point coordination function (PCF), which is based on a poll-and response mechanism. These MAC schemes are inadequate to resolve differentiation and prioritization between frames and multimedia applications such as VoIP and audio/video conferencing with strict performance constraints. Due to these applications have become widely popular, a new extension was vital. In late 2005, IEEE 802.11 TG approved the IEEE 802.11e amendment [5] to provide an acceptable level of quality of service (QoS) for multimedia applications. The 802.11e proposes the hybrid coordination function (HCF), which uses a contention-based channel access method, known as enhanced DCF channel access (EDCA). EDCA has the ability to operate simultaneously with a polling-based HCF controlled channel access (HCCA). In addition to the differentiation and prioritization that IEEE 802.11e offers, the transmission opportunity (TXOP) was introduced in order to improve MAC efficiency. A TXOP is an interval of time in which multiple data frames can be transferred from one station to another (also known as bursting). During a TXOP period the station can transmit multiple data frames without entering the backoff procedure, reducing the overhead due to contention and backoff period. Along with frame bursting, another type of acknowledgment (ACK), known as block ACK, was established. Receivers can

ISSN: 2231-5381

http://www.ijettjournal.org

Page 2636

International Journal of Engineering Trends and Technology (IJETT) - Volume4 Issue6- June 2013
acknowledge multiple received data frames efficiently by using just a single extended ACK frame. III. OVERVIEW OF VIRTUALIZATION Today, in the era of space & power crunch, Virtualization technologies are getting lot of research interest because of their capability to share the hardware resources among multiple operating systems and still maintain isolation between virtual machines.[6] Advancements in virtualization technology allows enterprises and service providers to optimize the utilization of their server and storage resources by eliminating the traditional, inefficient one server, one application model. Virtualization enables a single physical server (or storage array) to host multiple virtual machines (VMs) called server consolidation. It allows flexible sharing of physical system resources across multiple VMs running multiple applications or services. A. Types of Virtualization Core of any virtualization technology is Hypervisor or Virtual Machine Manager (VMM). Hypervisor is a piece of software which allows each virtual machine to access & schedule the task on resources like CPU, disk, memory, network etc. At the same time hypervisor maintains the isolation between different virtual machines. Virtualization can be classified by the method in which hardware resources are emulated to the guest operating system. They are as follows Full Virtualization - Hypervisor controls the hardware resources & emulates it to guest operating system. In full virtualization guest do not require any modification. KVM is an example of full virtualization technology. Paravirtualizaion - In paravirtualization hypervisor controls the hardware resources & provides API to guest operating system to access the hardware. In paravirtualization, guest OS requires modification to access the hardware resources. Xen is an example of paravirtualization technology. There are a number of key business benefits that are motivating enterprise IT organizations to adopt virtualization technologies. Some of the most significant reasons include: Business continuity and disaster recovery Flexibility and agility Reduced downtime Server consolidation Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery Virtualization allows easier software migration, including system backup and recovery, which makes it extremely valuable as a Disaster Recovery (DR) or Business Continuity Planning (BCP) solution. Virtualization can duplicate critical servers, so IT does not need to maintain expensive physical duplicates of every piece of hardware for DR purposes. Business Agility Virtualization can greatly increase business agility and flexibility. By decoupling business processing from physical hardware, virtualization improves agility by enabling IT to respond to rapid changes in demand. Reduced Downtime Reduced downtime is another key driver for virtualization. Virtual images are easier to restore after a failure either an operational failure (such as a virus infection) or a hardware failure. The portability of virtual images allows new and different hardware to be used for recovery, further reducing the downtime Server Consolidation Server consolidation and improved server utilization is another driver for virtualization adoption. Virtualization allows enterprises to combine the workload from multiple underutilized physical machines into a single physical system. This dramatically reduces the overall hardware spending, as it requires far fewer physical systems for the same application workload. It also has a dramatic effect on the overhead costs, including power, cooling, storage, and physical administration. Virtual machine (VM) consolidation has become a common practice in clouds, Grids, and datacenters. While this practice leads to higher CPU utilization, we observe its negative impact on the TCP throughput of the consolidated VMs: As more VMs share the same core/CPU, the CPU scheduling latency for each VM increases significantly. Such increase leads to slower progress of TCP transmissions to the VMs. An application's performance in a virtual machine environment can deliver markedly from its performance in a non virtualized environment because of interactions with the underlying virtual machine monitor and other virtual machines. At the same time, a large category of communication intensive distributed applications and software components exist, such as web services, high performance grid applications, transaction processing, and graphics rendering, that often wish to communicate across

B. The Benefits of Virtualization

ISSN: 2231-5381

http://www.ijettjournal.org

Page 2637

International Journal of Engineering Trends and Technology (IJETT) - Volume4 Issue6- June 2013
Current WLAN systems which endure difficulties due to the increasing expectations of end users and volatile bandwidth Delay-boundary demands from new higher data rate services, such video teleconferencing, multimedia streaming, file transfer, and online gaming. IV. RESEARCH BACKGROUND AND CONTEXT Performance of voice and video traffic on WLANs has been one of the favourite topics of the academic researchers. A number of research studies have been conducted to evaluate various architectures and schemes of quality of service in WLANs. Berthou, Gayraud, Aphand and Prudhommeaux and Diaz [8] have revealed that the CSMA/CA mode of DCF communications in 802.11b networks with Dynamic Rate Shifting (DRS) settings do not yield acceptable performance in 802.11 networks. The Enhanced DCF introduced in 802.11e was expected to enhance multimedia performance but Zhu, Li, Chlamtac, and Prabhakaran [8] argued that EDCF should be configured in priority mode and bandwidth reservation should be carried out. Lee, Hall, Yum, Kim, and Kim [9] employed a simulation based study to estimate the amount of bandwidth required to be reserved per 802.11 stations for streaming multimedia traffic. They discovered that it is a very challenging task in cross-traffic mode (with voice and video streaming simultaneously to assure real time performance). The estimates vary stochastically with size of packets and size of video resolution and window size. In a similar study by Zhai, Chen and Fang [10], it is revealed that QoS provisioning in WLAN networks and the bandwidth required per station for multimedia streaming traffic are vague and can only be estimated for aggregate traffic rate at access point. Also, the estimates may differ for fixed and mobile users because the fading on the channels may have to be taken into account for mobile users. Based on this estimation, as demonstrated by Bejerano and Bhatia [11], the number of access points required can be estimated for given number of users within a coverage area. There is hardly any flexibility available especially if high bit rate real time multimedia is employed. Khayam, Karande, Radha and Louinov [12] estimated that high density multimedia traffic on WLANs may contain lots of useless and corrupt packets that cannot be estimated by the network administrator and the performance does not increase consistently by increasing the bandwidth because background packets related to the streaming session may get stuck in the buffers that should be flushed out quickly otherwise the video session gets starved of bandwidth slowly and is ultimately terminated. This phenomenon is also observed by Cranley and Davis [13]. They also observed that the high burst nature of streaming traffic of high bit rate results in high queuing delays at the access points. These authors concluded those packet size and packet rates are the key determinants of performance in WLANs. Lower these attributes higher will be the effective utilisation of bandwidth per access point and higher will be the number of WLAN stations supported. In this context, Natkeniec and Pach [14] demonstrated that the best way to estimate the performance of multimedia streams in WLAN networks is to carry out simulations at full load on various architectures and conclude the optimal configurations. Given these challenges presented by the scholars, we want to solve the question on how a large scale WLAN network can be implemented in a virtualised environment to offer IP multimedia streaming services. we want to present a study with modelling of a multilayer WLAN network for a virtualisation based network comprising of large arrays of WLAN stations per access point and the WLAN stations in turn connected through WLAN access switches. We will employ the NS2 simulator and model the network. We will add an array of multimedia streaming servers sharing load through massive parallel processing (a key feature of virtualised server arrays) that shall be accessed by the WLAN stations through application demand configurations on NS2. We will vary the bit rate and video resolution of the video streams and will use multiple codecs in the audio streams and will conclude upon an optimal traffic configuration for the network. To ensure QoS configuration, we will configure Priority Queuing. To ensure high load, we will model large number of WLAN stations on the network (say, 100). Our focus will be on throughput, queuing delay, jitters and packet losses to analyse the quality of multimedia services experienced by the end users of the 802.11 network providing access to the virtualised server array configured to deliver workload sharing for collectively serving the IP multimedia users. V.DISCUSSION AND FUTURE WORK We will implement the above configurations in a Fast Ethernet switched network and will compare performance. Primarily, we will try to find the rise in threshold of bit rate and video resolution on wired networks against wireless networks. After getting the results of the simulations, we will make recommendations for designing optimal WLAN network for streaming multimedia applications for virtual networks. A. Aim and Objectives Our aim is to study the behaviour of WLANs running multimedia streams by modelling and simulating a high load WLAN on NS2 and recommend optimal configurations to ensure good quality and performance for end users. The objectives of the study are proposed to be: (a) Create a multi-layer WLAN model on NS2 with high load multimedia streams delivered by a large array of

ISSN: 2231-5381

http://www.ijettjournal.org

Page 2638

International Journal of Engineering Trends and Technology (IJETT) - Volume4 Issue6- June 2013
virtual servers (say, 20) accessed by large number of users simultaneously (say, 100). Provide high bandwidth on the network to ensure that bandwidth is not a limitation and then run simulations for different packet size, packet rates and video resolution size for video streams and different codecs for audio streams. Observe the throughput, queuing delay, jitters and packet losses in all the configurations and choose the optimal one. Compare these attributes with a fast Ethernet switched network and observe to what extent the thresholds can be raised. Based on the results, make recommendations to implement an optimal WLAN for corporate networks that can ensure good performance for the end users. have been concentrated on multimedia streams delivered by a virtual server, since the server consolidation is widely accepted and the majority of organizations have deployed virtualization technologies the attention must be given to the improvement of QoS parameters of wireless networks to ensure good quality and performance for end users. REFERENCES
[1] [2] IEEE Std. 802.11 WG, Part 11: Wireless LAN Medium Access Control (MAC) and Physical Layer (PHY) Specifications,. 1999. IEEE Std. 802.11 WG Std 802.11a, Part 11: Wireless LAN Medium Access Control (MAC) and Physical Layer (PHY) Specifications: High-speed Physical Layer in the 5 GHz Band, 1999 IEEE Std. 802.11 WG Std 802.11b, Part 11: Wireless LAN Medium Access Control (MAC) and Physical Layer (PHY) Specifications: Further Higher-Speed Physical Layer Extension in the 2.4 GHz Band, 1999. IEEE Std. 802.11 WG Std 802.11g, Part 11: Wireless LAN Medium Access Control (MAC) and Physical Layer (PHY) Specifications: Further Higher-Speed Physical Layer Extension in the 2.4 GHz Band, 2003. IEEE Std. 802.11 WG Std 802.11e: Wireless LAN Medium Access Control (MAC) and Physical Layer (PHY) Specifications: Medium Access Control (MAC) Quality of Service Enhancements", 2005 P. Barham, B. Dragovic, K. Fraser, S. Hand, T. Harris, A. Ho, R. Neugebauer, I. Pratt, and A. Warfield. Xen and the art of virtualization. In SOSP 03, New York, 2003. Berthou, P., Gayroud, T., Alphand, O., Prudhommeaux, C. and Diaz, M. A Multimedia Architecture for 802.11b networks. IEEE Transactions. p. 1742-1747, 2003 Zhu, H., Li, M., Chlamtac, I., Prabhakaran, B. A Survey of Quality of Service in IEEE 802.11 Networks. Mobility and Resource Management. IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications. p. 614, 2004. Lee, H. K., Hall, V., Yum, K. H., Kim, K., and Kim, E. J. Bandwidth Estimation in Wireless LANs for Multimedia Streaming Services. Advances in Multimedia, Korea: Hindawi Publications. Article ID 70429. p. 1-7, 2007. Zhai, H., Chen, X., and Fang, Y. How Well Can the IEEE 802.11 Wireless LAN Support Quality of Service?. IEEE Wireless Communications, Vol. 4 (6): p. 3084-3094, 2005. Bejerano, Y. and Bhatia, R. S. MiFi: A Framework for Fairness and QoS Assurance in Current IEEE 802.11 Networks with Multiple Access Points. IEEE Infocom. p. 1-12, 2004. Khayam, S. A., Karande, S., Radha, H., and Loguinov, D. Performance analysis and modeling of errors and losses over 802.11b LANs for high-bit-rate real-time multimedia. Signal Processing: Image Communication. Vol. 18: p. 575595. Elsevier, 2003. Cranley, N. and Davis, M. Performance Evaluation of Video Streaming with Background Traffic over IEEE 802.11 WLAN Networks. ACM. p. 131-139, 2005. Natkaniec, M. and Pach, A. R. Simulation Analysis Of Multimedia Streams Transmission In IEEE 802.11 Networks. ACM. p. 1-3, 2006.

(b)

(c)

(d)

[3]

(e)

[4]

VI.CONCLUSION The benefits of server virtualization are widely accepted and the majority of organizations have deployed virtualization technologies. The main advantage of server virtualization is efficiency and using one machine to simulate multiple servers saves time, energy and money. Less heat is generated and less electricity is used. Virtualization allows data centers to consolidate their server inventories and clear up old or unnecessary equipment. Companies in data-intensive industries with thousands of servers can decrease their physical space requirements significantly. Despite the advantages of server virtualization, significant downsides exist. Virtualization splits the physical machines processing power and gives a portion to each simulated server. This makes the clients with high-demand needs to slow down its performance. At the same time the use of IEEE 802.11 WLANs growing at a rapid pace. The falling cost of WLAN products has also led to their increased use in consumer homes. Although currently WLANs are predominantly used for data transfer, the higher bandwidth provided by new WLAN technologies such as IEEE 802.11g and IEEE 802.11e will ultimately lead to their increasing use for multimedia transmissions. However, the delivery of multimedia applications from a virtualized central server to a large number of WLAN clients is a challenging and resource intensive task and delivering multimedia content over this kind of network faces many challenges. Many researchers and manufacturing agencies interested in the transmission of multimedia streams over networks. However none of them

[5]

[6]

[7]

[8]

[9]

[10]

[11]

[12]

[13]

[14]

ISSN: 2231-5381

http://www.ijettjournal.org

Page 2639