15355925
Customizable virtual private network service with QoS
Abstract In this paper, we propose and implement Virtual Network Service (VNS), a value-added network service for deploying virtual private networks (VPNs) in a managed wide-area IP network. The key feature of VNS is its capability of providing a customer with a VPN that is customizable with management capabilities and performance properties comparable to a dedicated physical network. In addition, VNS ensures confidentiality of data and principals through the use of IPSEC. The main technique underlying VNS is the virtualization of routers in both control and data planes. Virtualization of the control plane enables customizable routing and signaling per VPN. On the data plane, packet forwarding and link bandwidth are virtualized. Virtualization of the forwarding mechanism on the data plane enables forwarding of traffic according to each VPN's topology and policies. Virtualization of the link bandwidth enables each VPN to have guaranteed quality of service (QoS) and customized resource management policies. We have developed a VNS prototype for deployment on the CAIRN network. The VNS prototype implements several resource management mechanisms including packet scheduling, signaling and runtime monitoring. A graphical user interface enables service providers to manage, configure and deploy VPNs remotely.
15028798
An active networking approach to service customization
Active networking is a powerful technology to insert new functionality into networking. We look at how active networking technology can be used to customize network services. We observe that users often want slightly different versions of network services such as multicast and network quality of service. We propose to implement these services as a base service that provides the basic service functionality and a customization code module that allows users to customize the service. The customization module uses a service-specific API to modify service behavior. We compare this architecture with the traditional active networking architecture based on execution environments and active applications. We also present several examples of customizable network services.
47344583
Double rulings for information brokerage in sensor networks
We study the problem of information brokerage in sensor networks, where information consumers (sinks, users) search for data acquired by information producers (sources). In-network storage such as geographical hash table (GHT) has been proposed to store data at rendezvous nodes for consumers to retrieve. In this paper, we propose a double rulings scheme that stores data replicas on a curve instead of one or multiple isolated sensors. The consumer travels along another curve that is guaranteed to intersect the producer curve. The double rulings is a natural extension of the flat hashing scheme such as GHTs. It has improved query locality--i.e., consumers close to producers find the data quickly--and structured aggregate queries, i.e., a consumer following a curve is able to retrieve all the data. Furthermore, by the flexibility of retrieval mechanisms, we have better routing robustness (as multiple retrieval paths are available) and data robustness against regional node failures. We show by simulation that the double rulings scheme provides reduced communication costs and more balanced traffic load on the sensors.
17381912
Hydrogen-bonding interactions in the active site of a low molecular weight protein-tyrosine phosphatase
Molecular dynamics simulation of the Michaelis complex, phospho-enzyme intermediate, and the wild-type and C12S mutant have been carried out to examine hydrogen-bonding interactions in the active site of the bovine low molecular weight protein-tyrosine phosphatase (BPTP). It was found that the Sγ atom of the nucleophilic residue Cys-12 is ideally located at a position opposite from the phenylphosphate dianion for an inline nucleophilic substitution reaction. In addition, electrostatic and hydrogen-bonding interactions from the backbone amide groups of the phosphate-binding loop strongly stabilize the thiolate anion, making Cys-12 ionized in the active site. In the phospho-enzyme intermediate, three water molecules are found to form strong hydrogen bonds with the phosphate group. In addition, another water molecule can be identified to form bridging hydrogen bonds between the phosphate group and Asp-129, which may act as the nucleophile in the subsequent phosphate hydrolysis reaction, with Asp-129 serving as a general base. The structural difference at the active site between the wild-type and C12S mutant has been examined. It was found that the alkoxide anion is significantly shifted toward one side of the phosphate binding loop, away from the optimal position enjoyed by the thiolate anion of the wild-type enzyme in an SN2 process. This, coupled with the high pKa value of an alcoholic residue, makes the C12S mutant catalytically inactive. These molecular dynamics simulations provided details of hydrogen bonding interactions in the active site of BPTP, and a structural basis for further studies using combined quantum mechanical and molecular mechanical potential to model the entire dephosphorylation reaction by BPTP. c © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. J Comput Chem 21: 1192–1203, 2000
17256385
A flocking based algorithm for document clustering analysis
Social animals or insects in nature often exhibit a form of emergent collective behavior known as flocking. In this paper, we present a novel Flocking based approach for document clustering analysis. Our Flocking clustering algorithm uses stochastic and heuristic principles discovered from observing bird flocks or fish schools. Unlike other partition clustering algorithm such as K-means, the Flocking based algorithm does not require initial partitional seeds. The algorithm generates a clustering of a given set of data through the embedding of the high-dimensional data items on a two-dimensional grid for easy clustering result retrieval and visualization. Inspired by the self-organized behavior of bird flocks, we represent each document object with a flock boid. The simple local rules followed by each flock boid result in the entire document flock generating complex global behaviors, which eventually result in a clustering of the documents. We evaluate the efficiency of our algorithm with both a synthetic dataset and a real document collection that includes 100 news articles collected from the Internet. Our results show that the Flocking clustering algorithm achieves better performance compared to the K- means and the Ant clustering algorithm for real document clustering.
6250126
Landmark-Based Information Storage and Retrieval in Sensor Networks
For a wide variety of sensor network environments, location information is unavailable or expensive to obtain. We propose a location-free, lightweight, distributed, and data-centric storage/retrieval scheme for information producers and information consumers in sensor networks. Our scheme is built upon the Gradient Landmark-Based Distributed Routing protocol (GLIDER) [8], a two-level routing scheme where sensor nodes are partitioned into tiles by their graph distances to a small set of local landmarks so that localized and efficient routing can be achieved inside and across tiles. Our information storage and retrieval scheme uses two ideas on top of the GLIDER hierarchy — a distributed hash table on the combinatorial tile adjacency graph and a double-ruling scheme within each tile. Queries follow a path that will provably reach the data replicated by the producer(s). We show that this scheme compares favorably with previously proposed schemes, such as Geographic Hash Tables (GHT), providing comparable data storage performance and better locality-aware data retrieval performance. More importantly, this scheme uses no geographic information, makes few assumptions on the network model, and achieves better load balancing and structured data processing and aggregation even for sensor fields with complex geometric shapes and non-trivial topology.
623541
A multiresolution volume rendering framework for large-scale time-varying data visualization
We present a new parallel multiresolution volume rendering framework for large-scale time-varying data visualization using the wavelet-based time-space partitioning (WTSP) tree. Utilizing the wavelet transform, a large-scale time-varying data set is converted into a space-time multiresolution data hierarchy, and is stored in a time-space partitioning (TSP) tree. To eliminate the parent-child data dependency for reconstruction and achieve load-balanced rendering, we design an algorithm to partition the WTSP tree and distribute the wavelet-compressed data along hierarchical space-filling curves with error-guided bucketization. At run time, the WTSP tree is traversed according to the user-specified time step and tolerances of both spatial and temporal errors. Data blocks of different spatio-temporal resolutions are reconstructed and rendered to compose the final image in parallel. We demonstrate that our algorithm can reduce the run-time communication cost to a minimum and ensure a well-balanced workload among processors when visualizing gigabytes of time-varying data on a PC cluster.