System Support for Bandwidth Management and Content Adaptation in Internet Applications

David Andersen, Deepak Bansal, Dorothy Curtis, Srinivasan Seshan1, Hari Balakrishnan
M.I.T. Laboratory for Computer Science
Cambridge, MA 02139
{dga, bansal, dcurtis, srini, hari}@lcs.mit.edu

Proc. USENIX OSDI Conf., San Diego, CA, October 2000.

Abstract

This paper describes the implementation and evaluation of an operating system module, the Congestion Manager (CM), which provides integrated network flow management and exports a convenient programming interface that allows applications to be notified of, and adapt to, changing network conditions. We describe the API by which applications interface with the CM, and the architectural considerations that factored into the design. To evaluate the architecture and API, we describe our implementations of TCP; a streaming layered audio/video application; and an interactive audio application using the CM, and show that they achieve adaptive behavior without incurring much end-system overhead. All flows including TCP benefit from the sharing of congestion information, and applications are able to incorporate new functionality such as congestion control and adaptive behavior.

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