QoS based resource management for Internet applications

Unrestricted In recent years, many Internet based applications have arisen to take advantage of widespread inexpensive broadband connections. However, congestion on Internet is still significant. Therefore, efficient management of Internet resource that lead to improvements in Quality of Service (QoS) for Internet based applications remains an important problem. In this dissertation, we focus on this problem in the context of several important applications.; Specifically, we consider three classes of Internet based applications, as follows. File downloading is an important class of applications, due its high bandwidth usage, mainly due to the success of applications such as BitTorrent (BT). While the current BT systems use a single torrent based approach, torrent files are related to each other and empirical evidence suggests that most nodes participate in multiple torrents. Consequently, in this part of the dissertation, we propose a multi-torrent BT system and illustrates that our approach improves the overall system performance provides incentives for nodes to act as seeds.; The use of P2P-based design in providing large scale video streaming services has become more popular due to its effective use of Internet and server resources. Live streaming and Video-on-Demand (VoD) streaming are typical examples which can take advantages of a P2P-based approach. In this part of the dissertation, we focus on a number of fundamental open questions in designing P2P-based VoD systems. We explore practical solutions to these questions and show they result in better QoS.; Although P2P-based design of VoD systems received much attention in recent years, most existing VoD systems do not have built-in incentives. In this part of the dissertation, we consider a BT-like VoD system and study the following questions: (1) why an incentive mechanism is needed, and (2) what are appropriate incentives for a BT-like VoD system. We propose a layered coding based incentives approach and show that: (a) our approach does provide better incentives than BT’s current Tit-For-Tat (TFT) mechanism, and (b) our approach improves system performance as well as uses system resource efficiently.; Uploads correspond to another important class of Internet based applications. In this part of the dissertation, we consider the following problem in the context of Bistro, a system that focuses on collection of data over the Internet. We focus on a data assignment problem within the Bistro fault tolerance protocol. We formulate this problem as a non-linear optimization problem and develop a genetic algorithm based heuristic as an approximation. We show that our approach is more accurate than several simple heuristics used for comparison, and efficient, as compared to a brute-force approach.