Efficient cross-layer routing and congestion control architectures for distributed systems

In this thesis, we present the design and analysis of cross-layer congestion control and routing protocols to address the above challenges of major distributed systems. Our schemes derive an efficient rate metric which sources use to set their sending rates and which routers/switches use as a link weight to compute an optimal path. Among other contributions our rate and path computation schemes achieve network level max-min fairness where available resources are quickly utilized as long as there is demand for them. Our schemes have prioritized rate allocation mechanisms to satisfy different network level service level agreements (SLA)s on throughput and delays.;For cloud datacenter networks, our scheme uses a light weight front end server (FES) to allow the use of multiple NNS and there by mitigate the shortcomings of existing architectures. For hybrid P2P networks our schemes ensure high and accurate incentives to participating peers. Such fair incentives attract more peers which securely download and distribute contents. The thesis also presents efficient content index management schemes for the hybrid P2P networks with robust incentive implementation mechanisms.;We have implemented our protocols for general networks (the Internet), for cloud datacenter and hybrid P2P networks in the well known NS2 simulator. We have conducted detailed packet level and trace-based experiments. Simulation results show that our protocol for general networks can result in the reduction of the average file completion time (AFCT) by upto 30% when compared with well known existing schemes. Our cross-layer design for cloud datacenter networks can achieve a content transfer time which is about 50% lower than the existing schemes and a throughput which is higher than existing approaches by upto than 60%. Our detailed trace-based experiments also shows that our hybrid P2P protocol outperforms existing schemes in terms of file download time and throughput by up to 30% on average. The results also demonstrate that our hybrid P2P scheme obtains fair uplink prices for the uploaders and fair cost for the downloaders maintaining an overall system fairness. Besides, the results show the efficient enforcements of the prioritized allocations. Our implementation of the hybrid P2P protocol using an Apache SQL Server with PHP in Linux virtual machines demonstrates that content index management mechanisms of our protocol are scalable. (Abstract shortened by UMI.).