Network aware application dissemination in prioritized wireless networks

We address the problem of dissemination of application data in distributed systems over wireless networks with priority structure, with two key constraints.¹ Firstly, data elements within a flow are characterized by application-context sensitive information priorities, requiring dynamic packet marking capabilities. Secondly, the significant performance variability of the wireless environment reduces the effectiveness of traditional congestion control schemes applied to both prioritized and non-prioritized systems. By incorporating awareness of network state obtained from the estimation of end-to-end performance, the performance of the delivered content can be improved and the wasteful discard of packets by the network avoided. We perform extensive measurements on a prototype system in a satellite environment, and observed that even under highly stressed circumstances, the system responds by discarding/delaying lower priority traffic in favor of higher priority traffic, and maintains stability over the course of all experiments. Furthermore, the results show that the use of network awareness feedback can significantly improve performance, particularly in a regime where the system is attempting to recover from congestion collapse.