Tiger Team Projects
The following enumeration provides an overview of collaborations between members of the bwHPC-S5 team and scientists, i.e. tiger teams. To apply for support by a tiger team, click
An Analysis of Multicast Traffic in Wireless Networks
Today wireless local area networks (WLANs) are part of most network infrastructures, providing access to data at work, at home, and at public places. In addition, today many protocols exist that make use of multicast to share and receive data in a group-like manner. However, multicast is often disabled as a precautionary measure, since multicast is expected to have negative impacts on network performance. We want to determine whether there is a need to optimize multicast or protocols using multicast when being used in WLAN environments. Thus, in this thesis a simulation study is performed, evaluating the effects of multicast traffic on WLANs using the IEEE Standard 802.11n.
To design an accurate study, a thorough survey of literature in related fields is done. As a result, we present various simulation models enabling us to evaluate multicast traffic in WLANs. In addition, DNS service discovery over multicast DNS (mDNS) is evaluated as a use case. Furthermore, we propose an extension to mDNS, reducing the amount of traffic needed to be transmitted when using mDNS. We further discuss how to execute independent simulations in parallel on a high performance computation cluster, the various precautions that need to be taken, and the necessary preparations that need to be made. While our simulation study indicates that the effects on network performance of mDNS used within a WLAN environment are moderate, it also indicates that multicast traffic at higher data rates does not have as negative an impact on the network performance in small WLANs as anticipated.
The Tiger-Team installed the program Omnet 4.6 on the bwUniCluster and created Moab-submit-scripts for the calculations using 'GNU parallel'.
Members of the Tiger-Team: Andreas Rain (Uni Konstanz | AG Verteilte Systeme, Prof. Dr. Marcel Waldvogel), Rainer Rutka (Uni Konstanz | KIM/Rechenzentrum)
Status: finished.