1874082
TCP-real: improving real-time capabilities of TCP over heterogeneous networks
We present a TCP-compatible and -friendly protocol which abolishes thr ee major shortfalls of TCP for reliable multimedia applications over heterogeneous networks: (i) ineffective bandwidth utilization, (ii) unnecessary congestion-oriented responses to wireless link errors (e.g., fading channels) and operations (e.g. handoffs), and (iii) wasteful window adjustments over asymmetric, low-bandwidth reverse paths. We propose TCP-Real, a high-throughput transport protocol that minimizes transmission-rate gaps, thereby enabling better performance and reasonable playback timers. In TCP-Real, the receiver decides with better accuracy about the appropriate size of the congestion window. Slow Start and timeout adjustments are used whenever congestion avoidance fails; however, rate and timeout adjustments are cancelled whenever the receiving rate indicates sufficient availability of bandwidth. We detail the protocol design and we report significant improvement on the performance of the protocol with time-constrained traffic, wireless link errors and asymmetric paths.
3967435
Experimental Evaluation of Red in Heterogeneous Environments
11589147
Studies of Radical Model for Retrieval of Cursive Chinese Handwritten Annotations
Our research focuses on Chinese online ink matching that tries to match handwritten annotations with handwritten queries without attempting to recognize them. Previously, we proposed a semantic matching scheme that uses elastic matching with a dynamic programming approach based on the radical model of Chinese characters. By means of semantic matching, a handwritten annotation may also be retrieved independently of writers via typed text query, or stored texts can be retrieved by handwritten queries. This work concerns with the behavior of the previously proposed radical model in several aspects including character normalization, stroke segmentation, structural information, dynamic programming costs and schemes. Based on our study, a new radical model is proposed. As a result, the recall of retrieval by handwritten query reaches 90% for the first hit (an improvement of 20% over previous results) and the recall by text query reaches 80% when top 20 matches are returned.
1830896
A Communication Virtual Machine
The convergence of data, voice and multimedia communication over digital networks, coupled with continuous improvement in network capacity and reliability has significantly enriched the ways we communicate. However, the stovepipe approach used to develop today's communication applications and tools results in rigid technology, limited utility, lengthy and costly development cycle, difficulty in integration, and hinders innovation. In this paper, we present a fundamentally different approach, which we call communication virtual machine (CVM) to address these problems. CVM provides a user-centric, model-driven approach for conceiving, synthesizing and delivering communication solutions across application domains. We argue that CVM represents a far more effective paradigm for engineering communication solutions. The concept, architecture, modeling language, prototypical design and implementation of CVM are discussed
33105882
CyberBridges A Model Collaboration Infrastructure for e-Science
The "CyberBridges" pilot project is an innovative model for creating a new generation of scientists and engineers who are capable of fully integrating cyberinfrastructure into the whole educational, professional, and creative process of their respective disciplines. CyberBridges augments graduate student education to include a foundation of understanding in advanced networking and grid infrastructure for high performance computing, and bridges the divide between the information technology community and diverse science and engineering disciplines. We demonstrate the effectiveness of CyberBridges by providing four case studies. Groundwork has begun to extend the outreach of CyberBridges for international research and education collaborations.
1383951
Improving TCP smoothness by synchronized and measurement-based congestion avoidance
In this paper, we observe that although multiplicative decrease is necessary to accomplish fairness in congestion control, it does not inevitably sacrifice system throughput, as long as the system operates between the knee and the cliff, according to an equation. However, even when the system throughput is relatively stable, end users of real-time applications do not necessarily experience a smooth traffic, mainly caused by the unsynchronized window adjustments due to random congestion indications. We analyzed and evaluated the negative impact of random window adjustments on smoothness, short-term fairness, and even long-term fairness measured by a novel fairness metric defined in this paper. Therefore, we propose an experimental congestion avoidance mechanism to improve TCP smoothness for media-streaming applications. The mechanism relies on a fine-grained RTT estimation to measure the network condition, and coordinates the upward and backward window adjustments to abolish the damage of unsynchronized window control. Congestive packet drops are reduced by a new control parameter g, and the bottleneck queue length can also be controlled in an end-to-end way. Simulation results confirm that the new mechanism enhance significantly the smoothness and fairness, without a cost of responsiveness. In fact, by enabling a new parameter d, the responsiveness can be even enhanced when the bandwidth is under-utilized.
7423428
Optimal Power Allocation in Wireless Networks with Transmitter-Receiver Power Tradeoffs
For many wireless communication links, such as those employing turbo codes or sequentially-decoded convolutional codes, the power consumption of the decoder at the receiver depends on the received signal power and, hence, on the transmitted signal power. By transmitting a signal at a power higher than the minimum required for successful reception, the transmitter can “assist” the receiver by reducing the receiver decoding effort and thereby reducing the overall power consumption on the link. In this paper, we consider sender-receiver power tradeoffs in data-gathering trees. We formulate an optimization problem to optimally assign power to the nodes in the tree for maximizing the lifetime of the data-gathering tree, which is equivalent to the time until network partition due to battery outage. We propose a Binary Search Algorithm for optimal power assignment among nodes that maximizes the tree lifetime. Our Binary Search Algorithm can be easily extended to handle practical considerations such as node mobility and peak power constraints at nodes. Using turbo codes as an example of a channel coding technique, we demonstrate significant improvements in network lifetimes as a result of sender-receiver power tradeoffs. These improvements are observed under a wide variety of network conditions and are more pronounced in densely deployed networks and networks with asymmetric power costs.
206924421
Classification of access network types: Ethernet wireless LAN, ADSL, cable modem or dialup?
Ethernet, wireless LAN, ADSL, cable modem and dialup are common access networks, but have dramatically different characteristics. Fast and accurate classification of access network type can improve protocol or application performance significantly. In this paper, we propose a simple and efficient end-end scheme to classify the type of an access network into three categories: Ethernet, wireless LAN and low-bandwidth connection. Our scheme is based on the intrinsic characteristics of the various access networks and utilizes the median and entropy of packet pair inter-arrival times. Extensive experiments show that our scheme obtains accurate classification results in a very short time (10 to 100 seconds).
2272663
Refactoring Middleware with Aspects
Middleware platforms, such as Web services, J2EE, CORBA, and DCOM, have become increasingly popular during the last decade. They have been very successful in solving distributed computing problems for a large family of application domains. The architecture of middleware systems have gone through many significant cycles of evolution, both in terms of the completeness of functionality and the range of adoptions for different types of platforms. However, at the same time, it is getting increasingly difficult to achieve and to maintain a high level of adaptability and configurability because the structure of the middleware architecture is becoming overly complicated and rigid. We attribute that problem to the limitations of traditional software decomposition methods. Aspect-oriented programming, on the contrary, has introduced new design perspectives that permit the superimpositions of different abstraction models on top of one another. This is a very powerful technique for separating and simplifying design concerns. In our effort of applying principles of aspect orientation to the middleware architecture, we first pragmatically analyze the use of aspects in the middleware architecture. We then show that aspects are the correct remedy for the above outlined middleware problems by quantifying crosscutting concerns in the legacy implementations of several prominent middleware systems. Our aspect analysis results strongly indicate that modularity of middleware architecture is greatly hindered by the wide existence of tangled logic. To go one step further, we factor out a number of crosscutting concerns identified in the mining process, reimplement them as aspects, and superimpose them back into the refactored architecture. This allows us to use a set of software engineering metrics to quantify the refactorization in terms of changes in the structural complexity, modularity, and performance of the resulting system. This aspect-oriented refactoring proves that aspect orientation is capable of composing orthogonal design requirements. The final "woven" system is able to correctly provide both the fundamental functionality and the "aspectized" functionality with negligible overhead and an overall leaner architecture. Furthermore, the "aspectized" feature can be configured in and out during compile-time, which greatly enhances the configurability of the architecture.
45852164
An Agent-Based Hybrid Intelligent System for Financial Investment Planning
Many complex problems including financial investment planning require hybrid intelligent systems that integrate many intelligent techniques including expert systems, fuzzy logic, neural networks, and genetic algorithms. however, hybrid intelligent systems are difficult to develop due to complicated interactions and technique incompatibilities. this paper describes a hybrid intelligent system for financial investment planning that was built from agent points of view. this system currently consists of 13 different agents. the experimental results show that all agents in the system can work cooperatively to provide reasonable investment advice. the system is very flexible and robust. the success of the system indicates that agent technologies can significantly facilitate the construction of hybrid intelligent systems.
2688646
A unified framework for image database clustering and content-based retrieval
With the proliferation of image data, the need to search and retrieve images efficiently and accurately from a large image database or a collection of image databases has drastically increased. To address such a demand, a unified framework called <i>Markov Model Mediators</i> (MMMs) is proposed in this paper to facilitate conceptual database clustering and to improve the query processing performance by analyzing the summarized knowledge. The unique characteristics of MMMs are that it provides the capabilities of exploring the affinity relations among the images at the database level and among the databases at the cluster level respectively, using an effective data mining process. At the database level, each database is modeled by an intra-database MMM which enables accurate image retrieval within the database. Then the conceptual database clustering is performed and cluster-level knowledge summarization is conducted to reduce the cost of retrieving images across the databases. This framework has been tested using a set of image databases, which contain various numbers of images with different dimensions and concept categories. The experimental results demonstrate that our framework achieves better retrieval accuracy via inter-cluster retrieval than that of intra-cluster retrieval with minimal extra effort.