Internet services have a characteristic of bursty traffic. To deal with the burstiness and protect valuable customers from traffic surge, a stress-resilient server must be able to control the quality of different classes of requests in a coordinated way so as to guarantee a fair and graceful performance degradation in stress conditions. Such quality assurance technologies can also protect the server from distributed denial-of-service attacks by downgrading the service quality of the requests with suspicious intentions. The goal of this project is to develop an application-level multi-resource management mechanism and a coordinated space/time request scheduling strategy for stress-resilience and high service availability on streaming servers.
Intellectual Merit The proposed resource management system features three key innovations. First is a harmonic network-I/O bandwidth allocation scheme. The proposed scheme not only maximizes the overall bandwidth utilization, but also provides self-management and performance isolation features to guarantee quality spacings in terms of stream bitrate between different request classes and to enhance the service availability. Second is a novel request scheduling algorithm with self-tuning feedback control that ensures fair and graceful performance degradation of requests with respect to their startup latency. Self-tuning feedback control deals with the impact of Internet traffic burstiness and provides consistent quality assurance in both long and short timescales. The third novelty of this project lies in a coordinated multi-resource management strategy that determines when and how to schedule stream requests so as to meet the quality requirements in terms of both stream bitrate and startup latency and meanwhile maximizing the streaming service availability.
Broader Impact Todays Internet services are often vulnerable to traffic surge. This research will advance discovery and understanding of the quality assurance problem in stress conditions. By fusing the proposed stress-resilient technology into streaming services, this research will ultimately enhance the service availability and survivability to stress and DDoS attacks. In addition, this project has an integral education component. Research-based materials about Internet services will be instilled into the undergraduate and graduate distributed computing curriculum. Under-represented students will also be innovated to participate in this integrated research and education project.
