6876063
Popularity-wise proxy caching for interactive streaming media
Most of the current proxy caching algorithms for streaming video media assume that users favor the beginning of the media object. However, this assumption is questionable in highly interactive scenarios, such as e-learning, where some parts of the video other than the prefix can also be popular. A new segment-based proxy caching algorithm, named popularity-wise caching, is proposed for highly interactive streaming. It is designed to deal with arbitrary popularity distribution of media content. Simulations are performed using synthetic traces with different kinds and levels of user interactivity. The results show that the performance of current segment-based caching (such as exponential caching and soccer caching) degrade with increasing user interactivity, while popularity-wise caching can provide the lowest user startup latency for interactive requests and highest bandwidth saving for the backbone network.
14377220
On large scale deployment of parallelized file transfer protocol
The parallelized file transfer protocol (P-FTP) is a novel network resource aware parallel technique for improving file transfer performance on the Internet. Before starling the parallel file transfer sessions, it considers the available resources in the network (available bandwidth) and at the file servers (memory and CPU utilization). The client dynamically changes the file portions being downloaded from different file servers by monitoring the FTP flows and detecting slow servers and congested links. Early experimentation on Planet-Lab (2004) for a single P-FTP client suggests that the download time can be reduced by more than 50% for large files. In this paper, our goal is to evaluate whether P-FTP can be widely adopted within the Internet, To this end, we have carried out a simulation-based study to investigate the performance of P-FTP when it is adopted by a large user base. We find that, by virtue of its self-tuning capability, P-FTP continues to exhibit improved performance even with many simultaneous clients. Our results also demonstrate that introducing a large number of P-FTP users has no adverse effect on the performance perceived by users of the traditional single server file transfer. We attribute this improvement to the fact that P-FTP dynamically adapts the parallel sessions in response to changes in network state and server resources. This illustrates that P-FTP is highly scalable and is hence suitable for widespread deployment in the Internet.
8147679
Deploying long-lived and cost-effective hybrid sensor networks
In this paper, we consider the problem of network deployment in hybrid sensor networks, consisting of both resource-rich and resource-impoverished sensor devices. The resource-rich devices, called micro-servers, are more expensive but have significantly greater bandwidth and energy capabilities compared to the low-cost, lowpowered sensors. Such hybrid sensor networks have the potential to support the higher bandwidth communications of broadband sensor networking applications, as
7989034
Internal popularity of streaming video and its implication on caching
As most proxy caches for streaming media cache only a part of the video, the most important issue for a caching algorithm is to determine which portion of the video should be cached. Due to different part of the video can have different popularity, the studying of the internal popularity characteristics of streaming videos is very important for the development of efficient cache mechanisms. In this paper, we showed that the internal popularity of the majority of the most popular videos obeys a k-transformed Zipf-like distribution through analyzing two 7-month long traces recorded at different streaming video servers of an entertainment video-on-demand provider. Based on this empirical internal popularity distribution model, we then proposed a new dynamical caching algorithm. The results of simulations proved that this algorithm can have better performance than algorithms based on other models and it has similar performance compare with fine-grained caching but requires significantly less state information.
14928068
Traffic engineering for MPLS-based virtual private networks
This paper considers the traffic engineering of MPLS-based Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) with multiple classes of service in an offline and centralised setting. We focus on two main issues. Firstly, we point out that the one label switched path (LSP) per ingress-egress pair constraint can be relaxed for the case of MPLS-based VPNs due to the ease in classifying flows on a per-VPN basis. This allows us to use LSP with finer granularity and thus better load balancing. Secondly, we point out that the single objective traffic engineering formulations proposed in literature address only one particular aspect of the traffic engineering problem. In this paper, we propose a multiobjective traffic engineering problem which takes resource usage, link utilisation and number of LSPs into account. The proposed optimisation problem is NP-complete and involves a large number of variables. We propose an heuristic to solve this problem.
9105322
CSCL for community building and digital equity
The Minnesota Educators and Leaders Technology Initiative (MELTI) contributes to community building and digital equity through computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL) activities and other project activities. The CSCL activities that include asynchronous, synchronous, and video conferencing are designed to address issues of integration faced by the MELTI participating schools which have high percentage of minority students. The notions of social inclusion and technology literacy play a key role in the CSCL activities design for the purpose of overcoming barriers to digital equity.
29521519
Linear Broadcast Routing
Abstract In this paper we examine the problem of performing broadcasts in networks where the messages are constrained to follow linear paths. Many high speed networks, where routing is done in specialized hardware, have this characteristic. We show that the general problem is NP-complete but find a polynomial time approximation algorithm which is guaranteed to provide a solution which is within twice the optimal. We also suggest some generalizations of this work and propose several open problems.
7608405
Dynamic routing of restorable QoS connections in MPLS networks
In this paper we consider dynamic routing of restorable quality of service (QoS) connections in multi-protocol label switched (MPLS) networks under a single link failure model. To route a restorable QoS connection, two link disjoint label switched paths from the ingress to the egress node need to be computed such that both paths comply with the QoS constraints. When looking at QoS constraints like bandwidth guarantee and end-to-end delay bound, the current approach described in the literature converts the end-to-end delay bound into an effective bandwidth in a pre-processing step before computing two link disjoint bandwidth guaranteed paths. We argue that the current approach results in poor network performance and suggest a new approach that exploits the dependency between the end-to-end delay, chosen path and provisioned bandwidth. Thus, the two link disjoint paths are computed dynamically with their respective bandwidths so that they meet both the bandwidth guarantee and the end-to-end delay bound. In this paper, we present a new generic algorithm and two new linear programming formulations that implement the new approach. The two linear programming formulations are not intended to be used in a production environment due to their extensive running times, up to 2.5 minutes on average per request, but rather to benchmark approximation algorithms that in turn can be used in production. Furthermore our experiments show that the network performance improvement when exploiting the dependency between end-to-end delay, chosen path and provisioned bandwidth is substantial
14766680
QoS Driven Parallelization of Resources to Reduce File Download Delay
In this paper, we propose a novel approach for reducing the download time of large files over the Internet. Our approach, known as parallelized file transport protocol (P-FTP), proposes simultaneous downloads of disjoint file portions from multiple file servers. P-FTP server selects file servers for the requesting client on the basis of a variety of QoS parameters, such as available bandwidth and server utilization. The sensitivity analysis of our file server selection technique shows that it performs significantly better than random selection. During the file transfer, P-FTP client monitors the file transfer flows to detect slow servers and congested links and adjusts the file distributions accordingly. P-FTP is evaluated with simulations and real-world implementation. The results show at least 50 percent reduction in download time when compared to the traditional file-transfer approach. Moreover, we have also carried out a simulation-based study to investigate the issues related to large scale deployment of our approach on the Internet. Our results demonstrate that a large number of P-FTP users has no adverse effect on the performance perceived by non-P-FTP users. In addition, the file servers and network are not significantly affected by large scale deployment of P-FTP
15149925
A Formal Theory of Undirected Graphs in Higher-Order Logic
This paper describes a formal theory of undirected (labeled) graphs in higher-order logic developed using the mechanical theoremproving system HOL. It formalizes and proves theorems about such notions as the empty graph, single-node graphs, finite graphs, subgraphs, adjacency relations, walks, paths, cycles, bridges, reachability, connectedness, acyclicity, trees, trees oriented with respect to roots, oriented trees viewed as family trees, top-down and bottom-up inductions in a family tree, distributing associative and commutative operations with identities recursively over subtrees of a family tree, and merging disjoint subgraphs of a graph. The main contribution of this work lies in the precise formalization of these graph-theoretic notions and the rigorous derivation of their properties in higher-order logic. This is significant because there is little tradition of formalization in graph theory due to the concreteness of graphs. A companion paper [2] describes the application of this formal graph theory to the mechanical verification of distributed algorithms.