Improving Network Efficiency

As computer networks have grown, so have expectations on the size and type of data being transferred. In the past, the Internet was mostly used for simple transfers on the order of a few kilobytes. Today, however, the type of data being transferred has grown to include multimedia and other objects that can hundreds of megabytes to full gigabytes. This has lead to strain on the network as users expectations are beginning to outpace the capability of the network. This dissertation investigates various aspects of network efficiency, in both the wired and wireless forms. Typically, Quality of Service (QoS) is considered to be one of the most important aspects in designing networks and data transfer protocols. The reluctance to risk harming a flow's individual QoS, has lead to the exclusion of research on techniques that trade an individual flow's QoS for an overall improvement in network efficiency (and hence, QoS). Specifically, this work presents two techniques and related research with an aim in improving overall network efficiency by trading a small amount of delay for individual flows. Additionally, in order to better determine future methods for improving efficiency, wired and wireless network analysis is performed.