16179
Efficient indexing data structures for flash-based sensor devices
Flash memory is the most prevalent storage medium found on modern wireless sensor devices (WSDs). In this article we present two external memory index structures for the efficient retrieval of records stored on the local flash memory of a WSD. Our index structures, MicroHash and MicroGF (micro grid files), exploit the asymmetric read/write and wear characteristics of flash memory in order to offer high-performance indexing and searching capabilities in the presence of a low-energy budget, which is typical for the devices under discussion. Both structures organize data and index pages on the flash media using a sorted by timestamp file organization. A key idea behind these index structures is that expensive random access deletions are completely eliminated. MicroHash enables equality searches by value in constant time and equality searches by timestamp in logarithmic time at a small cost of storing index pages on the flash media. Similarly, MicroGF enables spatial equality and proximity searches in constant time. We have implemented these index structures in nesC, the programming language of the TinyOS operating system. Our trace-driven experimentation with several real datasets reveals that our index structures offer excellent search performance at a small cost of constructing and maintaining the index.
1538276
Distributed spatio-temporal similarity search
In this paper we introduce the distributed spatio-temporal similarity search problem: given a query trajectory Q, we want to find the trajectories that follow a motion similar to Q, when each of the target trajectories is segmented across a number of distributed nodes. We propose two novel algorithms, UB-K and UBLB-K, which combine local computations of lower and upper bounds on the matching between the distributed subsequences and Q. Such an operation generates the desired result without pulling together all the distributed subsequences over the fundamentally expensive communication medium. Our solutions find applications in a wide array of domains, such as cellular networks, wild life monitoring and video surveillance. Our experimental evaluation using realistic data demonstrates that our framework is both efficient and robust to a variety of conditions.
51877153
ATPC: adaptive transmission power control for wireless sensor networks
Extensive empirical studies presented in this paper confirm that the quality of radio communication between low power sensor devices varies significantly with time and environment. This phenomenon indicates that the previous topology control solutions, which use static transmission power, transmission range, and link quality, might not be effective in the physical world. To address this issue, online transmission power control that adapts to external changes is necessary. This paper presents ATPC, a lightweight algorithm of Adaptive Transmission Power Control for wireless sensor networks. In ATPC, each node builds a model for each of its neighbors, describing the correlation between transmission power and link quality. With this model, we employ a feedback-based transmission power control algorithm to dynamically maintain individual link quality over time. The intellectual contribution of this work lies in a novel pairwise transmission power control, which is significantly different from existing node-level or network-level power control methods. Also different from most existing simulation work, the ATPC design is guided by extensive field experiments of link quality dynamics at various locations and over a long period of time. The results from the real-world experiments demonstrate that 1) with pairwise adjustment, ATPC achieves more energy savings with a finer tuning capability and 2) with online control, ATPC is robust even with environmental changes over time.
11736259
Analog Placement Based on Novel Symmetry-Island Formulation
In this paper, we present the first amortized linear-time packing algorithm for the placement with symmetry constraints. We first introduce the concept of a symmetry island which is formed by modules of the same symmetry group in a single connected placement. Based on this concept and the B*-tree representation, we propose automatically symmetric-feasible B*-trees (ASF-B*-trees) to directly model the placement of a symmetry island. Unlike the previous works that can handle only ID symmetry constraints, our ASF-B*-tree is the first in the literature to additionally consider 2D symmetry. We then present hierarchical B*-trees (HB*-trees) which can simultaneously optimize the placement with both symmetry islands and non-symmetry modules. Unlike the previous works, our approach can guarantee the close proximity of symmetry modules and significantly reduce the search space based on the symmetry-island formulation. In particular, the packing time for an ASF-B*- tree or an HB*-tree is the same as that for a plain B*-tree (only amortized linear) and much faster than previous works which need at least loglinear time. Experimental results show that our approach achieves the best published quality and runtime efficiency for analog placement.
1475764
An Extendible Hash for Multi-Precision Similarity Querying of Image Databases
We propose multi-precision similarity matching where the image is divided into a number of subblocks, each with its associated color histogram. We present experimental results showing that the spatial distribution information recorded by multiprecision color histograms helps to make similarity matching more precise. We also show that sub-image queries are much better supported with multi-precision color histograms. To minimize the overhead, we employ a filtering scheme based on the 3-dimensional average color vectors. We provide a formal result proving that filtering with multi-precision color histograms is complete. Finally, we develop a novel extendible hashing structure for indexing the average color vectors. We give experimental results showing that the proposed structure significantly outperforms the SR-tree.
22001959
A Pinwheel Scheduler for Three Distinct Numbers with a Tight Schedulability Bound
Abstract. Given a multiset of positive integers 
 $A=\{a_1,a_2,\ldots,a_n\}$ , the pinwheel problem is to find an infinite sequence over 
 $\{1,2,\ldots,n\}$ such that there is at least one symbol i within any subsequence of length ai. The density of A is defined as 
 $\rho(A)=\sum^n_{i=1} (1/a_i)$ . In this paper we limit ourselves to instances composed of three distinct integers. The best scheduler [5] published previously can schedule all instances with a density of less than 0.77. A new and fast scheduling scheme based on spectrum partitioning is presented in this paper which improves the 0.77 result to a new 
 $\frac{5}{6}\approx 0.83$ density threshold. This scheduler has achieved the tight schedulability bound of this problem.
3645474
Exploiting a search engine to develop more flexible Web agents
With the rapid growth of the World Wide Web, more and more people rely on the online services to acquire and integrate information. However, it is time consuming to find the online services that are perfectly suited for a given task. First, the users might not have enough information to fill in the required input fields for querying an online service. Second, the online service might generate only partial information. Third, the user might only find the inverse version of the desired service. We propose a framework to develop flexible Web agents that handle these imperfect situations. In this framework we exploit a search engine as a general information discovery tool to assist finding and pruning information. To demonstrate this framework, we implemented two Web agents: the Internet inverse geocoder and the address lookup module.