MAC AND APPLICATION LAYER PROTOCOLS FOR HIGH PERFORMANCE NETWORKING

Author

Anil Mehta, Southern Illinois University CarbondaleFollow

Date of Award

8-1-2011

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

Department

Electrical and Computer Engineering

First Advisor

Viswanathan, R.

Abstract

High-performance networking (HPN) is of significance today in order to enable next-generation applications using wired and wireless networks. Some of the examples of HPN include low-latency industrial sensing, monitoring and automation using Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). HPN however requires protocol optimization at many layers of the open system interface (OSI) network model in order to meet the stringent performance constraints of the given applications. Furthermore, these protocols need to be impervious to denial of service (DoS) and distributed DoS (DDoS) attacks. Some of the key performance aspects of HPN are low point-to-point and end-to-end latency, high reliability of transmitted frames and performance predictability under various network load situations. This work focuses on two discrete issues in designing protocols for HPN applications. The first research issue looks at the Medium Access Control (MAC) layer of the OSI network model for designing of MAC protocols that provide low-latency and high reliability for point-to-point communication under a WSN. Existing standards in this area are governed by IEEE 802.15.4 specification which defines protocols for MAC and PHY layers for short-range, low bit-rate, and low-cost wireless networks. However, the IEEE 802.15.4 specification is inefficient in terms of latency and reliability performance and, as a result, is unable to meet the stringent operational requirements as defined by counterpart wired sensor networks. Work presented under current research issue describes new MAC protocols that are able to show low-latency transmission performance under strict timing constants for power limited WSNs. This enhancement of the MAC protocols is named extended GTS (XGTS) contained under extended CFP (ECFP) and is published under the IEEE's 802.15.4e standard. The second research issue focuses on the application layer of the OSI network model to design protocols that enhance the robustness of the text based protocols to various traffic inputs. The purpose of this is to increase the reliability of the given text based application layer protocol under a varied load. Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) is used as a case study and the work aims to build algorithms that ensure that SIP can continue to function under specific traffic conditions, which would otherwise deem the protocol useless due to DoS and DDoS attacks. Proposed algorithms investigate techniques that enhance the robustness of the SIP against parsing attacks without performing a deep parse of the protocol data unit (PDU). The desired effect of this is to reduce the time spent in parsing the SIP messages at a SIP router and as a result increase the number of SIP messages processed per unit time at a SIP router.