TY - JOUR
T1 - Measuring the impact of adversarial errors on packet scheduling strategies
AU - Fernández Anta, Antonio
AU - Georgiou, Chryssis
AU - Kowalski, Dariusz R.
AU - Widmer, Joerg
AU - Zavou, Elli
N1 - Funding Information:
The authors would like to thank the anonymous reviewers that their constructive feedback has helped to significantly improve the manuscript. This research was partially supported by the Madrid Regional Government (CM) through the TIGRE5-CM program (S2013/ICE-2919) and the Grant Cloud4BigData (S2013/ICE-2894, cofunded by FSE and FEDER), by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness with Grant TEC2014-55713-R and the Ramon y Cajal Grant (RYC-2012-10788), and by the Spanish Ministry of Education, Culture and Sports (MECD) with the Grant FPU12/00505.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2015, Springer Science+Business Media New York.
PY - 2016/4/1
Y1 - 2016/4/1
N2 - In this paper, we explore the problem of achieving efficient packet transmission over unreliable links with worst-case occurrence of errors. In such a setup, even an omniscient offline scheduling strategy cannot achieve stability of the packet queue, nor is it able to use up all the available bandwidth. Hence, an important first step is to identify an appropriate metric to measure the efficiency of scheduling strategies in such a setting. To this end, we propose an asymptotic throughput metric which corresponds to the long-term competitive ratio of the algorithm with respect to the optimal. We then explore the impact of the error detection mechanism and feedback delay on our measure. We compare instantaneous with deferred error feedback, which requires a faulty packet to be fully received in order to detect the error. We propose algorithms for worst-case adversarial and stochastic packet arrival models, and formally analyze their performance. The asymptotic throughput achieved by these algorithms is shown to be close to optimal by deriving lower bounds on the metric and almost matching upper bounds for any algorithm in the considered settings. Our collection of results demonstrate the potential of using instantaneous feedback to improve the performance of communication systems in adverse environments.
AB - In this paper, we explore the problem of achieving efficient packet transmission over unreliable links with worst-case occurrence of errors. In such a setup, even an omniscient offline scheduling strategy cannot achieve stability of the packet queue, nor is it able to use up all the available bandwidth. Hence, an important first step is to identify an appropriate metric to measure the efficiency of scheduling strategies in such a setting. To this end, we propose an asymptotic throughput metric which corresponds to the long-term competitive ratio of the algorithm with respect to the optimal. We then explore the impact of the error detection mechanism and feedback delay on our measure. We compare instantaneous with deferred error feedback, which requires a faulty packet to be fully received in order to detect the error. We propose algorithms for worst-case adversarial and stochastic packet arrival models, and formally analyze their performance. The asymptotic throughput achieved by these algorithms is shown to be close to optimal by deriving lower bounds on the metric and almost matching upper bounds for any algorithm in the considered settings. Our collection of results demonstrate the potential of using instantaneous feedback to improve the performance of communication systems in adverse environments.
KW - Adversarial errors
KW - Asymptotic throughput
KW - Competitive analysis
KW - Error feedback mechanisms
KW - Packet scheduling
KW - Unreliable link
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U2 - 10.1007/s10951-015-0451-z
DO - 10.1007/s10951-015-0451-z
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:84961197008
SN - 1094-6136
VL - 19
SP - 135
EP - 152
JO - Journal of Scheduling
JF - Journal of Scheduling
IS - 2
ER -