Andreas Petlund successfully defended his PhD thesis
On Wednesday 16 December, Andreas Petlund successfully defended his PhD thesis Latency-improving mechanisms for reliable, interactive thin-stream applications. Petlund's work contributes with technology that improves the experienced quality of time-dependent network applications.
Andreas Petlund
Low latency is a requirement for many time-dependent Internet applications. Examples are stock trading, remote control of computers, and networked games. Many such applications use the reliable transmission control protocol (TCP) for communication, common to regular Internet applications such as browsing the web or sending email. This protocol will send packets again if the receiving end does not acknowledge that a packet was received within a given time frame. This is called retransmission. From analysis of such applications, Petlund has found that high delays often occur that reduce the experienced quality of the application. In his work, Petlund has developed modifications to TCP that are able to lower the retransmission latency for such time-dependent applications. Experiments show that delays of 10–20 seconds can be reduced to less than one second.
The mechanisms target the so-called "thin streams" applications, defined as applications that are sending small packets relatively infrequent and hence have low network bandwidth consumption. When packets are lost during network transmission, the method for retransmitting the data is paramount to the experienced delay. Petlund's method dynamically detects the thin streams and applies modifications that improve latency specifically for this class of applications.
The work was performed at Simula Research Laboratory and the Department of Informatics, University of Oslo. Prior to the defence, Petlund presented his trial lecture On the impact of multicore processors on multimedia systems.
The adjudication committee
- Associate Professor Kang Li, Computer Science Department, University of Georgia
- Professor Anna Brunstöm, Department of Computer Science, Karlstad University
- Associate Professor Michael Welzl, Department of Informatics, University of Oslo
Chair of the disputation
Nils Christophersen
Supervisors
Carsten Griwodz og Pål Halvorsen
Read More:
Announcement of the PhD defence at the University of Oslo's web pages (in Norwegian).
