System And Method For Multi Channel Packet Transmission
Abstract:
A method of transmitting packets wherein said packets are comprised in a plurality of flows the flows comprising flow characteristics controlling admission of incoming flows. A plurality of admitted incoming flows with the same class of service are inserted into a queue. A committed information rate value corresponding to said queue and a bandwidth available for transmission of said queue according to the identified committed information rate value are identified. An order for transmission for the queues is established based on the class of service of the queue and the identified bandwidth. A plurality of cells of the same size are generated from a plurality of frames and the cells are distributed between a plurality of individual transmission channels according to the ordered defined for transmission. A transmitter equipment and a receiver equipment are also disclosed.
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Notices, Deadlines & Correspondence
Alcatel lucent Italia
Via Trento 30
I 20059 Vimercate
2. DI PRISCO Paulo
Alcatel lucent Italia
Via Trento 30
I 20059 Vimercate
3. CORBETTA Giuliano
Alcatel lucent Italia
Via Trento 30
I 20059 Vimercate
4. BARZAGHI Giorgio
Alcatel lucent Italia
Via Trento 30
I 20059 Vimercate
5. VODOLA Francesco
Alcatel lucent Italia
Via Trento 30
I 20059 Vimercate
6. DE BLASIO Giuseppe
Alcatel lucent Italia
Via Trento 30
I 20059 Vimercate
7. GEROSA Marzio
Alcatel lucent Italia
Via Trento 30
I 20059 Vimercate
8. SALGARELLI Luca
via Branze 38
I 25123 Brescia
9. GRINGOLI Francesco
via G. Zadei36
I 25123 Brescia
Specification
System and Method for Multi-Channel Packet Transmission
The present invention relates to packet transmission. In a variant, the invention
relates to packet radio transmission.
BACKGROUND ART
Some wireless communication systems are based on packet radio paradigm. An
example of such systems is the so-called Ethernet radio systems. Such packet
radio systems typically require transmission schemes with the following
functionalities:
- exploit as fully as possible the available bandwidth of point-to-point multi-link
radio equipments;
- guarantee as much as possible a high level of quality of service (QoS), traffic
aggregation and drop precedence;
- dynamic admission control of packets or frames;
- fast restoration of traffic in case of hardware failure;
- no, or insignificant impact on traffic in case of single or multiple radio failure or
multi-link throughput change.
SUMMARY
In view of the above requirement, a new approach is desired in designing the
architecture of new generation point-to-point multi-link wireless systems. The
known protection schemes available on legacy radio equipments {e.g., N:1 , N+1
or 1+ 1) or legacy multilink configuration (such as N+0) typically require that
packets are statically mapped into a single link. However, in order to achieve as
much as possible a complete load balance in a multi-link system and a per
flow/conversation protection engine is desirable to preserve some kind of priority
hierarchy among incoming services in most or all conditions. It is further
desirable for such engine to operate in real-time and in a transparent manner
preferably without disrupting served conversation/flow.
In radio applications, due to the limited availability of spectrum, it is not desirable
to waste radio resources (bandwidth). Therefore, an engineered traffic
distribution mechanism is typically required that allows for fully (or at least
efficiently) exploiting the available resources. Accordingly an intelligent per
flow/conversation protection scheme that is autonomously and dynamically
capable of discarding low priority flows/conversations and preserve high priority
flows/conversations is desirable.
Moreover, with the introduction of Adaptive Coded Modulation (in which the
modulation, coding and possibly other parameters are typically adapted
according to the conditions present on the radio link), it becomes desirable that
traffic aggregation and packet protection be performed with a solution capable of
overcoming, or at least substantially obviating, the drawbacks of the static
approach which is a solution typically provided by some legacy radio systems.
Whenever radio bandwidth changes due to radio propagation condition, it is
desired that the traffic impact be limited as much as possible, improving the
protection efficiency and potentially approaching a 'hitless' condition.
The more limited the availability of transmission resource (bandwidth) becomes,
such as in digital radio transmission systems, the more desirable it becomes to
make effective usage of the bandwidth available from parallel transmission
resources in a radio multi-link transmission system for packet based traffic.
In addition to the above-described scenario, another variable which may need to
be kept under control is the latency of the system. Using one channel at a time
for the traffic transmission, the delay experienced packet by packet will typically
be the one given by the single link. On the contrary, by considering the entire
multi-link array as a single Virtual Link, latency may be reduced to improve the
performance of the system.
Some solutions addressing the above problem are already known.
One of such known solutions is based on standard Link Aggregation known as
LAG, IEEE 802.1 AX-2008.
A non-exhaustive, brief description of some of the functionalities proposed by
LAG, IEEE 802.1 AX-2008 (for simplification hereinafter referred to LAG) is given
below:
The load balancing that can be achieved in LAG is typically strongly
dependent on the statistics of the traffic to be spanned over the multi-link
transmission system. Typical implementations are based on hashing algorithm
that distributes the traffic over the available channels in a random way. The
hashing function typically operates on the content of some specific/standard
fields of the packets themselves. This approach may not guarantee an effective
usage of the total bandwidth available and the results may be even poorer if the
traffic is encrypted with mechanisms such as IP-SEC (standing for Internet
Protocol Security, which relates to providing security to IP traffic using
authentication and encryption on IP packets).
Standard LAG typically addresses physical layers with high reliability {e.g.
fiber or copper). The operating status of such physical layers can typically be
easily referred to as 'working' or 'not-working' which may correspond to 100% or
0% availability of bandwidth. A change in such status typically happens quite
seldom as it can be mainly due to failure {e.g., hardware failure) of the equipment
or the line. As a consequence, when a link changes to 'not-working' status, an
impact on the traffic can be accepted only because it is coming from failure which
is supposed to be a scarce event. On the contrary, when the physical layer is
radio with adaptive modulation, the status may correspond to 100% bandwidth
availability or less {e.g. 75%, 50%, 25% or 0%) and the change of such status
may happen more often as it may be due to radio propagation conditions, e.g.
due to weather conditions (which is a normal and expected behavior of radio
media).
• When one of the links becomes unavailable, the total throughput is then
typically reduced: standard LAG typically does not guarantee only the dropping of
a low priority traffic. A typical scenario may be the following: LAG foresees a
distributor spanning incoming conversation over a set of physical interfaces.
Conversations are distributed regardless of their traffic/service type or priority.
Once distributed, QoS mechanism applies only on the physical interface and not
on the aggregated traffic. In such a way, if physical interface is overloaded with
all high priority traffic, even the high priority traffic may be discarded. At the end,
LAG first distributes, then deals with priority having QoS on physical interfaces.
Standard LAG typically does not allow spreading conversations over
multiple links at the same time, because reordering is not contemplated. This
leads to a not guaranteed load balance. When conversations have different
bandwidth profiles, allocating each conversation to no more than one channel
does not typically allow for fully exploiting the complete multilink available
bandwidth. Typically, the residual bandwidth of each single link will be wasted
because no conversation can fit into the remaining available capacity.
Standard LAG does not allow to have links with different capacities and to
change these capacities dynamically. Additionally, the standard does not allow
links having two different capacities in the two directions. This asymmetrical
situation may easily occur in presence of adaptive coded modulation.
A non-exhaustive, brief description of some of the functionalities proposed by
ML-PPP (RFC1 7 17, RFC2686) are given below:
A session per link typically has to be established in order to exchange link
capabilities {e.g. rate, format, compression,.. .). As a consequence of this
negotiation mechanism, it is typically hard to apply a ML-PPP instance over links
that change dynamically their own capacity, due to the adaptive coded
modulation, and guarantee a hitless traffic distribution.
The usage of adaptive coded modulation potentially may lead to
asymmetrical link bandwidth due to different propagation conditions over the
wireless media (typically the radio bit rate is symmetrical in both direction.
However, as propagation phenomena may be different in forward and backward
directions, this may lead to temporary situation in which bit rate becomes
asymmetrical)
Padding is contemplated. MLPPP foresees packets fragmentation and
distribution over multiple links. Typically fragment are of the same size/length.
Whenever a packets cannot be split in integer number of fragments, the last
fragment is padded to reach the complete fragment size/length.
Consequently, packet protection, namely traffic distribution without significantly
disrupting the served traffic, is typically not available using the above
technologies.
Embodiments of the present invention feature a method of transmitting packets
wherein said packets are comprised in a plurality of flows comprising frames,
each flow comprising a corresponding plurality of flow characteristics comprising
at least a committed information rate value and a class of service, the method
comprising:
- controlling admission of incoming flows;
- mapping frames contained in admitted flows into fragments;
- inserting a plurality of fragments having the same class of service into
a queue;
- obtaining a committed information rate value corresponding to said
queue;
- identifying a bandwidth available for transmission of said queue
according to said obtained committed information rate value;
- defining an order of transmission for the queue based on the class of
service of the queue and the identified bandwidth;
- generating a plurality of cells of the same size from a plurality of
fragments;
- distributing the plurality of cells between a plurality of individual
transmission channels according to the order defined for transmission.
According to some specific embodiments, a fragment has a determined size in
terms of bytes and the step of mapping frames into fragments comprises:
- mapping the entire frame in the fragment if the size of the frame is
smaller than the determined size of the fragment; or
- breaking the frame into portions of smaller size and mapping one or
more of said portions in the fragment if the size of the frame is larger
than the determined size of the fragment.
According to some specific embodiments, one or more of said plurality of
channels has a load prior to receiving one or more of said cells and said
distribution of the plurality of cells on the plurality of individual transmission
channels is made by loading a channel being less loaded prior to a channel
being more loaded.
According to some specific embodiments, the frames of an incoming flow
comprise frame fields and said incoming flow is classified according to one or
more frame fields of the frames comprised in said flow before being controlled for
admission.
According to some specific embodiments, the method is used in packet radio
transmission.
According to some specific embodiments, the method further comprises
monitoring the usage of radio resources on each of said plurality of individual
transmission channels thereby maintaining knowledge of the load present on a
radio link used for such transmission.
Some embodiments of the invention feature a transmitter for transmitting packets
wherein said packets are comprised in a plurality of flows comprising frames,
each flow comprising a corresponding plurality of flow characteristics comprising
at least a committed information rate value and a class of service, the transmitter
comprising:
- an admission control module for controlling admission of incoming
flows;
- a compression and fragmentation module for mapping frames
contained in admitted flows into fragments and for inserting a plurality
of fragments having the same class of service into a queue;
- a scheduler for obtaining a committed information rate value
corresponding to said queue, for identifying a bandwidth available for
transmission of said queue according to said obtained committed
information rate value and for defining an order of transmission for the
queue based on the class of service of the queue and the identified
bandwidth;
- a cell generator for generating a plurality of cells of the same size from
a plurality of fragments;
- a dispatcher for distributing the plurality of cells between a plurality of
individual transmission channels according to the order defined for
transmission.
According to some specific embodiments, one or more of said plurality of
channels has a load prior to receiving one or more of said cells and said
dispatcher is configured for distributing said plurality of cells on the plurality of
individual transmission channels by loading a channel being less loaded prior to
a channel being more loaded.
According to some specific embodiments the frames of an incoming flow
comprise frame fields and the transmitter further comprises a classifier for
classifying said incoming flow according to one or more frame fields of the
frames comprised in said flow before being controlled for admission.
According to some specific embodiments, the classifier is further configured to
determine a type of compression and/or fragmentation and/or a class of service
and/or a queue for inserting a fragment.
According to some specific embodiments, the transmitter is configured to perform
packet radio transmission.
According to some specific embodiments, the dispatcher is configured for
monitoring the usage of radio resources on each of said plurality of individual
transmission channels thereby maintaining knowledge of the load present on a
radio link used for such transmission.
Some embodiments of the invention feature a receiver for receiving transmitted
packets the receiver comprising:
- a collector module for receiving a plurality of cells comprising payload
information of flows, each cell comprising an identifier field for
identifying an order of said cell;
- a reordering module for reordering said received cells, in case said
cells are received in disorder, according to the order of identifier field of
each received cell;
- a cell terminator and de-framer, for extracting the payload of each
received cell, and generating a bit-stream from said payload and
separating the bit-stream into fragments;
- a plurality of de-compression modules, each configured reconstructing
a frame from said fragments.
According to some specific embodiments, the receiver is configured to receiver
packets transmitted through radio transmission.
Some embodiments of the invention feature a packet transmission and reception
system comprising the transmitter and the receiver or a transceiver incorporating
the transmitter and the receiver as proposed herein.
Some embodiments of the invention feature a computer-executable or machineexecutable
program product for the implementation of the steps of the method of
transmission of packet as proposed herein when such program is run on a
computer or a machine.
These and further features and advantages of the present invention are
described in more detail, for the purpose of illustration and not limitation, in the
following description as well as in the claims with the aid of the accompanying
drawings.
BRIEF DESCRIPTION OF THE DRAWINGS
Figure 1 is an exemplary schematic representation of a conventional point-topoint
multi-link radio transmission system.
Figure 2 is an exemplary schematic representation of a point-to-point multi-link
radio transmission system according to some embodiments.
Figure 3 is an exemplary schematic representation of a transmission side of the
point-to-point multi-link radio transmission system of figure 2.
Figure 4 is an exemplary schematic representation of a reception side of the
point-to-point multi-link radio transmission system of figure 2.
DETAILED DESCRIPTION
For a better understanding of the solution proposed herein, a brief description of
an exemplary known system is first provided with reference to figure 1. In this
figure, a conceptual scheme for one possible physical realization of a known
point-to-point multi-link radio equipment is represented 1. As shown in the figure
an incoming traffic 10 is input into an indoor unit 11 comprising a transmitter
module 12 in charge of separating the incoming traffic into a plurality of
independent radio channels 13. Each of said independent radio channels 13 is
input into a respective microwave transmitter unit 14 which is in charge of
transmitting an independent channel through a point-to-point radio connection as
generally shown by reference numeral 16 through a branching module 15 which
performs an analog sum of the signals to be transmitted.
At the receive side, the individual channels are received by a branching module
25 which allows for discriminating and filtering the different radio channels within
a received signal and subsequently forwarding the individual channels to
respective microwave receiver unit 24. Each microwave receiver unit 24 at the
receive side forwards a respective independent channel 23 towards a base-band
processing unit 2 1 comprising a reception module 22 in charge of reconstructing
the original traffic 20 and forward it to external equipment.
The above description of a known point-to-point multi-link radio transmission
system is only exemplary and other physical realizations are also possible.
However, even if different configurations are used, the problem of an efficient use
of the radio resources, as described above, when the input traffic is distributed
over a plurality of individual radio channels is typically also present in such
different configurations.
Figure 2 illustrates an exemplary schematic representation of a point-to-point
multi-link radio transmission system according to some embodiments. In figure 2,
like elements have been given like reference numerals as those of figure 1.
At the transmit side, a transmission mechanism receives a plurality of incoming
flows for transmission through radio. The flows may be of different types {eg. Of
different CoS) or sizes {eg. CIR, or bit rate in general) while radio channels may
differ in channel space and/or throughput.
It may be mentioned that according to embodiments proposed herein, the
transmitter is configured so as to "consider", throughout the process for
transmission, an array of multiple radio channels as a single virtual channel that
may dynamically change its characteristics (for example throughput or delay).
Such changes in the characteristics of the virtual channel may depend on radio
propagation conditions or failure affecting one or more radio channels.
In the context of the present specification, the term virtual channel refers to a
compound of physical radio channels. Such channel is called virtual because it is
not physical radio channel but it has substantially the same parameters of a
physical radio channel such as available throughput and delay.
Referring now to figure 2, an incoming traffic flow 10 is input into an indoor unit
11 comprising a processing equipment 17. The processing equipment 17 is in
charge of processing the flow and provide such processed flow to output
channels for transmission as will be described in further detail in relation to figure
3. A plurality of microwave transmitter units 14 are in charge of transmitting the
processed flow through a point-to-point radio connection as generally shown by
reference numeral 16 through a branching module 15. The microwave transmitter
unit 14 may be an indoor or an outdoor unit.
At the receive side, a plurality of cells comprising portions of flow are received by
a branching module 25 and are input to respective microwave receiver units 24.
Each microwave receiver unit 24 at the receive side forwards the cells towards a
processing equipment 27 in charge of processing the received cells in order to
reconstruct the original traffic 20 and forward it to external equipment as will be
described in further detail in relation to figure 4 . The microwave receiver unit 24
may be an indoor or an outdoor unit.
Conceptually, the transmission process may be summarized, for the sake of
illustration and not limitation, in the preferred features described below:
1. Flow Admission Control: a dynamic admission control process is
preferably executed in real-time depending on virtual channel characteristics.
Such flow admission control procedure may admit some or all of the incoming
flows in order to guarantee a desired Service Level Agreement as configured for
a particular service. Such admission control may be performed according to the
corresponding traffic descriptor which is information typically present in the flows
and expressed in terms of for example committed information rate or peak
information rate, type of service and CoS.
2. Compression and Fragmentation: a procedure capable of applying frame
compression and/or fragmentation in order to achieve radio bandwidth
optimization and reduce delay variation for frames belonging to a higher CoS (as
these frames may be transmitted among fragments of packets with lower CoS).
In such case, the fragment obtained from the original frame is preferably not
padded to reach a minimum length. This is because the system is capable of
operating with fragments of any suitable length.
3. Congestion management and consequent actions: when the available
bandwidth of the virtual channel is not enough, as a result of a decrease in radio
channel throughput and/or an increase in input flow rates, a mechanism is
preferably employed which is able to queue packets and apply a process of
discarding:
a- frames corresponding to flows with input rate higher than the
Committed one but less than the Peak Rate {i.e., the so-called "yellow"
packets) corresponding to lower priority CoSs (starting from the lowest
CoS first); or
b- frames corresponding to flows with input rate within the Committed
one {i.e., the so-called "green" packets) corresponding to lower priority
CoSs (starting from the lowest CoS first); or
c- entire flows with input rate within the Committed one, regardless of the
CoSs the flows belong to, applicable only when current virtual channel
available bandwidth is not enough to sustain such flows; or
d- any combination of the above.
The above process is preferably performed in the above order, a to c, however
this is not mandatory and other orders may be applied.
As mentioned above, a flow typically has a so-called traffic descriptor associated
thereto which contains among others, two main parameters, one being the CIR
that is the committed information rate a customer pays for to an operator and the
other being the peak information rate (PIR) which is the maximum bit rate a
customer is allowed to consume that is considered not guaranteed by the
contract subscribed with the operator. Therefore, a bandwidth z between these
two values, namely CIR