2759775
Distributed channel management in uncoordinated wireless environments
Wireless 802.11 hotspots have grown in an uncoordinated fashion with highly variable deployment densities. Such uncoordinated deployments, coupled with the difficulty of implementing coordination protocols, has often led to conflicting configurations (e.g., in choice of transmission power and channel of operation) among the corresponding Access Points (APs). Overall, such conflicts cause both unpredictable network performance and unfairness among clients of neighboring hotspots. In this paper, we focus on the fairness problem for uncoordinated deployments. We study this problem from the channel assignment perspective. Our solution is based on the notion of channel-hopping, and meets all the important design considerations for control methods in uncoordinated deployments - distributed in nature, minimal to zero coordination among APs belonging to different hotspots, simple to implement, and interoperable with existing standards. In particular, we propose a specific algorithm called MAXchop, which works efficiently when using only non-overlapping wireless channels, but is particularly effective in exploiting partially-overlapped channels that have been proposed in recent literature. We also evaluate how our channel assignment approach complements previously proposed carrier sensing techniques in providing further performance improvements. Through extensive simulations on real hotspot topologies and evaluation of a full implementation of this technique, we demonstrate the efficacy of these techniques for not only fairness, but also the aggregate throughput, metrics.We believe that this is the first work that brings into focus the fairness properties of channel hopping techniques and we hope that the insights from this research will be applied to other domains where a fair division of a system's resources is an important consideration.
41447667
Load Balancing in Large-Scale RFID Systems
A radio frequency identifier (RFID) system consists of inexpensive, uniquely-identifiable tags that are mounted on physical objects, and readers that track these tags (and hence these physical objects) through RF communication. In this paper we, therefore, address this load balancing problem for readers - given a set of tags that are within range of each reader, which of these tags should each reader be responsible for such that the cost for monitoring tags across the different readers is balanced, while guaranteeing that each tag is monitored by at least one reader. We show that a generalized variant of the load balancing problem is NP-hard and hence present a 2-approximation centralized algorithm. We next present an optimal centralized solution for a specialized variant. Subsequently, we present a localized distributed algorithm that is probabilistic in nature and closely matches the performance of the centralized algorithms. Our results demonstrate that our schemes achieve very good performance even in highly dynamic large-scale RFID systems.
14357613
Construction of an efficient overlay multicast infrastructure for real-time applications
This paper presents an overlay architecture where service providers deploy a set of service nodes (called MSNs) in the network to efficiently implement media-streaming applications. These MSNs are organized into an overlay and act as application-layer multicast forwarding entities for a set of clients. We present a decentralized scheme that organizes the MSNs into an appropriate overlay structure that is particularly beneficial for real-time applications. We formulate our optimization criterion as a "degree-constrained minimum average-latency problem" which is known to be NP-hard. A key feature of this formulation is that it gives a dynamic priority to different MSNs based on the size of its service set. Our proposed approach iteratively modifies the overlay tree using localized transformations to adapt with changing distribution of MSNs, clients, as well as network conditions. We show that a centralized greedy approach to this problem does not perform quite as well, while our distributed iterative scheme efficiently converges to near-optimal solutions.
11368060
Packet classifiers in ternary CAMs can be smaller
Serving as the core component in many packet forwarding, differentiating and filtering schemes, packet classification continues to grow its importance in today's IP networks. Currently, most vendors use Ternary CAMs (TCAMs) for packet classification. TCAMs usually use brute-force parallel hardware to simultaneously check for all rules. One of the fundamental problems of TCAMs is that TCAMs suffer from range specifications because rules with range specifications need to be translated into multiple TCAM entries. Hence, the cost of packet classification will increase substantially as the number of TCAM entries grows. As a result, network operators hesitate to configure packet classifiers using range specifications. In this paper, we optimize packet classifier configurations by identifying semantically equivalent rule sets that lead to reduced number of TCAM entries when represented in hardware. In particular, we develop a number of effective techniques, which include: trimming rules, expanding rules, merging rules, and adding rules. Compared with previously proposed techniques which typically require modifications to the packet processor hardware, our scheme does not require any hardware modification, which is highly preferred by ISPs. Moreover, our scheme is complementary to previous techniques in that those techniques can be applied on the rule sets optimized by our scheme. We evaluate the effectiveness and potential of the proposed techniques using extensive experiments based on both real packet classifiers managed by a large tier-1 ISP and synthetic data generated randomly. We observe significant reduction on the number of TCAM entries that are needed to represent the optimized packet classifier configurations.
14498501
A clustering scheme for hierarchical control in multi-hop wireless networks
In this paper we present a clustering scheme to create a hierarchical control structure for multi-hop wireless networks. A cluster is defined as a subset of vertices, whose induced graph is connected. In addition, a cluster is required to obey certain constraints that are useful for management and scalability of the hierarchy. All these constraints cannot be met simultaneously for general graphs, but we show how such a clustering can be obtained for wireless network topologies. Finally, we present an efficient distributed implementation of our clustering algorithm for a set of wireless nodes to create the set of desired clusters.
8584874
Throughput Optimization and Fair Bandwidth Allocation in Multi-Hop Wireless LANs
There is an inherent well-known conflict between fairness and throughput that arises in many networking scenarios. A number of researchers have studied this problem in the context of (single-hop) wireless local area networks (WLANs), where clients directly exchange traffic with access points (APs). More recently, researchers have proposed multi-hop extensions to WLANs where client traffic is forwarded via a series of client-client links. In this paper, we show that the objective of improving throughput without sacrificing fairness can be much better met in multi-hop WLANs. We decouple this objective into two separate but related problems. First, we need an algorithm to organize clients into a multi-hop structure such that fair bandwidth allocation within this structure leads to improved throughput. Second, we need algorithms for performing fair bandwidth allocation within the determined multi-hop structure. In this paper, we first design optimal fair bandwidth allocation algorithms for both max-min throughput fairness and max-min time fairness in multi-hop WLANs. Subsequently, we design an efficient algorithm to find desirable multi-hop structures. With slight modifications, our results in this paper can be generalized to other multi-hop wireless networks as well. Our proposed solutions seamlessly integrate with legacy devices and hence are incrementally deployable. Simulation results demonstrate that our solutions can effectively improve throughput (by up to 114% or more) as well as network coverage while preserving fairness.
15037541
Power-performance trade-off using pipeline delays
We study the delays faced by instructions in the pipeline of a superscalar processor and its impact on power and performance. Instructions that are ready-on-dispatch (ROD) are normally delayed in the issue stage due to resource constraints even though their data dependencies are satisfied. These delays are reduced by issuing ROD instructions earlier than normal and executing them on slow functional units to obtain power benefits. This scheme achieves around 6% to 8% power reduction with average performance degradation of about 2%. Alternatively, instead of reducing the delays faced by instructions in the pipeline, increasing them by deliberately stalling certain instructions at appropriate times minimizes the duration for which the processor is underutilized leading to 2.5-4% power savings with less than 0.3% performance degradation.
36956169
Segmentation and classification of meetings using multiple information streams
We present a meeting recorder infrastructure used to record and annotate events that occur in meetings. Multiple data streams are recorded and analyzed in order to infer a higher-level state of the group's activities. We describe the hardware and software systems used to capture people's activities as well as the methods used to characterize them.
3132692
Distributed Database Systems in High-Speed Wide-Area Networks
The issues involved in developing a distributed database system (DDBS) in a high-speed environment are discussed. The inadequacy of existing database protocols in utilizing the gigabit network is described. A concurrency control protocol that performs better than traditional DDBSs in high-speed networks is developed. Both analytical and simulation results are presented. The focus is on the concurrency control aspect of DDBS since this protocol is at the heart of the overall functioning of the distributed system. >
8291592
Performance analysis of the send-on-demand: A distributed database concurrency control protocol for high-speed networks
In this paper, we consider an application of high-speed wide area networks, viz. that of distributed database systems (DDBS). In a high-speed environment, although the transmission delay decreases, the propagation delay (communication latency) now becomes the throughput thwarting factor. Existing Concurrency Control (CC) protocols do not address the communication latency problem. This paper is a continuation of our research work in this area. First, we very briefly summarize our previously reported research results, viz. the issues that are important for DDBS in high-speed wide area networks, and the description of a new CC protocol called 'send-on-demand'. A detailed comparison of this protocol with that of locking is provided, using analytical and simulation techniques. The datacycle scheme performs very well in a read-oriented environment, and the rest of the paper deals with developing and comparing hybrid CC schemes using datacycling for queries. Altogether, the performance of four concurrency control schemes is compared.
9170580
Network latency optimizations in distributed database systems
The advent of high-speed networks will enable the deployment of data-server systems (currently used in LANs) over WANs. The users of these systems will have the same high expectations with respect to performance parameters (such as the transaction throughput, response time and system reliability) as in the case of LANs. Thus, it is important to study the performance of existing distributed database protocols in the new networking environment, identify the performance bottlenecks and develop protocols that are capable of taking advantage of the high-speed networking technology. As a first step, in this paper, we examine the scalability of the server-based two-phase locking (s-2PL) protocol, and discuss three optimizations which allow the s-2PL protocol to be tailored for high-speed WAN environments where the size of the message is less of a concern than the number of rounds of message passing. These optimizations, collectively called the group two-phase locking (g-2PL) protocol, reduce the number of rounds of message passing by grouping lock grants, client-end caching and data migration. In a simulation study, 20-25% improvement in the response time of the g-2PL protocol over that of the s-2PL protocol was observed.