Computer Communications 26 (2003) 203

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Editorial

Scalability and trafc control in IP networks

The unprecedented increase in the number of Internet users, routers, and service providers has introduced signicant challenges to the design of scalable network architectures and end-to-end protocols. Web driven demand and trafc can exhibit extreme variability; providing predictable quality of service (QoS) without resorting to major overprovisioning is a difcult problem; facilitating dynamic group communication and multicast has spurred a multitude of proposals, each with its own idiosyncrasies and tradeoffs; QoS routing faces the computational complexity barrier; congestion control is asked to be fair, efcient, and stable in a complex environment; mobility and wireless channels impose new control dimensions and constraints; and faults in software and hardware introduce disruptions that may persist in time and spread in space. A common denominator to many of these examples is scalability, which, to varying degrees, plays an important role when designing and evaluating feasible solutions. This special issue includes a number of papers that span a variety of topics revolving around the theme of scalability to a large numbers of hosts, routers, and trafc ows in communication networks. The papers represent a subset of works presented at the SPIE International Conference on Scalability and Trafc Control in IP Networks, August, 2001, organized by the guest editors. The special issue papers underwent a separate, formal review process for the Computer Communications journal, following the conference which was by-invitation only. The rst paper, Dynamic Class Selection and Class Provisioning in Proportional Differentiated Services by Dovrolis and Ramanathan, explores class selection and provisioning under proportional delay differentiation, with the aim of achieving desired absolute QoS over relative QoS. In the second paper, Ren and Park study the performance

of optimal aggregate-ow scheduling using simulation, and show that the associated per-hop behavior (PHB) is able to export effective QoS separation and efciency properties over which scalable QoS can be facilitated. The third paper, Incentive Mechanisms for Smoothing out a Focused Demand for Network Resources by LeytonBrown, Porter, Prabhakar, Shoham and Venkataraman, proposes a novel game-theoretic approach for scheduling demand over time using incentive mechanisms. This enables smoothing out or load balancing of potentially concentrated demand for shared network resources. In the fourth paper, Bassali, Kamath, Hosamani and Gao consider heuristic approaches for placing proxies on the global Internet which gives preference to highly connected sites, and study the resulting performance effect, motivated by recent Internet topology measurements and their connectivity properties. The fth paper, Towards Scalable Network Emulation by Simmonds and Unger, discusses several issues related to scalable network emulation, with focus on scalability of a virtual network within the emulator and the efciency problems arising in achieving a scalable real-time I/O interface to the physical network. Finally, the sixth paper, Congestion Control Multicast in Wireless and Ad Hoc Networks by Tang and Gerla, explores congestion control for multicast trafc in wireless ad hoc networks. The paper considers the congestion control problem at both the medium access control (MAC) and routing layers, which enables several optimizations. Sonia Fahmy* Kihong Park Department of Computer science, Purdue University, USA E-mail address: fahmy@purdue.edu

* Corresponding author. Fax: 11-765-494-0739. 0140-3664/02/$ - see front matter q 2002 Published by Elsevier Science B.V. PII: S 0140-366 4(02)00136-6