346423
Enabling contribution awareness in an overlay broadcasting system
We consider the design of bandwidth-demanding broadcasting applications using overlays in environments characterized by hosts with limited and asymmetric bandwidth, and significant heterogeneity in outgoing bandwidth. Such environments are critical to consider to extend the applicability of overlay multicast to mainstream Internet environments where insufficient bandwidth exists to support all hosts, but have not received adequate attention from the research community. We leverage the multi-tree framework and design heuristics to enable it to consider host contribution and operate in bandwidth-scarce environments. Our extensions seek to simultaneously achieve good utilization of system resources, performance to hosts commensurate to their contributions, and consistent performance. We have implemented the system and conducted an Internet evaluation on Planet-Lab using real traces from previous operational deployments of an overlay broadcasting system. Our results indicate for these traces, our heuristics can improve the performance of high contributors by 10-240% and facilitate equitable bandwidth distribution among hosts with similar contributions.
383922
Early Experience with an Internet Broadcast System Based on Overlay Multicast
In this paper, we report on experience in building and deploying an operational Internet broadcast system based on Overlay Multicast. In over a year, the system has been providing a cost-effective alternative for Internet broadcast, used by over 4000 users spread across multiple continents in home, academic and commercial environments. Technical conferences and special interest groups are the early adopters. Our experience confirms that Overlay Multicast can be easily deployed and can provide reasonably good application performance. The experience has led us to identify first-order issues that are guiding our future efforts and are of importance to any Overlay Multicast protocol or system. Our key contributions are (i) enabling a real Overlay Multicast application and strengthening the case for overlays as a viable architecture for enabling group communication applications on the Internet, (ii) the details in engineering and operating a fully functional streaming system, addressing a wide range of real-world issues that are not typically considered in protocol design studies, and (iii) the data, analysis methodology, and experience that we are able to report given our unique standpoint.
1697925
The Impact of Heterogeneous Bandwidth Constraints on DHT-Based Multicast Protocols
In this paper, we consider support for bandwidth-demanding applications such as video broadcasting using DHTs. Our investigations focus on the impact of heterogeneity in the outgoing bandwidth capabilities of nodes on Scribe, a representative and relatively mature DHT-based multicast protocol. We expose important issues that arise due to the mismatch between the ID space that underlies the DHT and the outgoing bandwidth constraints on nodes.
32211361
On Computing a Largest Empty Arbitrarily Oriented Rectangle
Given a set P of n points within a rectangle R, we present an O(n3) time algorithm for computing an arbitrarily oriented empty rectangle of largest area in R that is bounded by a point of P on each of its four sides. We assume that R is large enough to contain such a rectangle.
7001903
Distributed object location in a dynamic network
Modern networking applications replicate data and services widely, leading to a need for location-independent routing -- the ability to route queries directly to objects using names independent of the objects' physical locations. Two important properties of a routing infrastructure are routing locality and rapid adaptation to arriving and departing nodes. We show how these two properties can be efficiently achieved for certain network topologies. To do this, we present a new distributed algorithm that can solve the nearest-neighbor problem for these networks. We describe our solution in the context of Tapestry, an overlay network infrastructure that employs techniques proposed by Plaxton, Rajaraman, and Richa [14].
14267213
Geometric segmentation of perspective images based on symmetry groups
Symmetry is an effective geometric cue to facilitate conventional segmentation techniques on images of man-made environment. Based on three fundamental principles that summarize the relations between symmetry and perspective imaging, namely, structure from symmetry, symmetry hypothesis testing, and global symmetry testing, we develop a prototype system which is able to automatically segment symmetric objects in space from single 2D perspective images. The result of such a segmentation is a hierarchy of geometric primitives, called symmetry cells and complexes, whose 3D structure and pose are fully recovered. Such a geometrically meaningful segmentation may greatly facilitate applications such as feature matching and robot navigation.
125992802
A tight bound on approximating arbitrary metrics by tree metrics
In this paper, we show that any n point metric space can be embedded into a distribution over dominating tree metrics such that the expected stretch of any edge is O(log n). This improves upon the result of Bartal who gave a bound of O(log n log log n). Moreover, our result is existentially tight; there exist metric spaces where any tree embedding must have distortion Ω(log n)-distortion. This problem lies at the heart of numerous approximation and online algorithms including ones for group Steiner tree, metric labeling, buy-at-bulk network design and metrical task system. Our result improves the performance guarantees for all of these problems.
10307808
A tight bound on approximating arbitrary metrics by tree metrics
In this paper, we show that any n point metric space can be embedded into a distribution over dominating tree metrics such that the expected stretch of any edge is O(log n). This improves upon the result of Bartal who gave a bound of O(log n log log n). Moreover, our result is existentially tight; there exist metric spaces where any tree embedding must have distortion Ω(log n)-distortion. This problem lies at the heart of numerous approximation and online algorithms including ones for group Steiner tree, metric labeling, buy-at-bulk network design and metrical task system. Our result improves the performance guarantees for all of these problems.