A study of Cyclone technology

Abstract

Since their advent, computer networks have used event-based mechanisms for managing resources. While technological advances have resulted in computer networking becoming ubiquitous, the performance of the networks suffers from these approaches of resource management. Cyclone technology, on the other hand, manages resources in a time-based manner, resulting in a networking technology which can deliver loss free, contention free, and jitter free data in a very efficient manner. In Cyclone, scheduled traffic reserves the use of resources in time and space at the time of establishing the connection. As a consequence, there are no losses, jitters, or contentions for any resources. This technology also supports on-demand traffic, for which available resources are allocated on-demand without affecting the performance of scheduled traffic and leading to higher resource utilization. The scheduling approach used indicates that the links can sustain very high loading without having any adverse impact on performance of the scheduled traffic. Clearly the time coordination among resources is the key in achieving jitter free and loss free computer communication with minimum end-to-end delay. Cyclone technology exploits such coordinations of resources in time and space and requires minimal processing at a node during data transfer. It eliminates the need for carrying header information allowing more efficient utilization of existing communication bandwidth. The problems of congestion and loss are removed through end-to-end time coordination among network components, thus leading to fewer control messages. For traffic with stringent timing requirements such as real-time audio and video, Cyclone technology offers well-suited network environments in which the end-to-end delay and jitter can be controlled and guaranteed. In this disseration, we present end-to-end design aspects and the feasibility of Cyclone technology. A design is presented for all aspects including components and scheduling, and the modes of operations in a Cyclone network have been considered. Our study on the behavior of the current scheduling technique shows that the connection acceptance probability is very high, link utilization can be close to 100%, and the worst case delays due to scheduling is rather low. (Also cross-referenced as UMIACS-TR-99-01)