4489692
Inferring Queue Sizes in Access Networks by Active Measurement
Router queues can impact both round-trip times and throughput. Yet little is publicly known about queue provisioning employed by Internet services providers for the routers that control the access links to home computers. This paper proposes QFind, a black-box measurement technique, as a simple method to approximate the size of the access queue at last mile router. We evaluate QFind through simulation, emulation, and measurement. Although precise access queue results are limited by receiver window sizes and other system events, we find there are distinct difference between DSL and cable access queue sizes.
1393061
Characteristics of streaming media stored on the Web
Despite the growth in multimedia, there have been few studies that focus on characterizing streaming audio and video stored on the Web. This investigation used a customized Web crawler to traverse 17 million Web pages from diverse geographic locations and identify nearly 30,000 streaming audio and video clips available for analysis. Using custom-built extraction tools, these streaming media objects were analyzed to determine attributes such as media type, encoding format, playout duration, bitrate, resolution, and codec. The streaming media content encountered is dominated by proprietary audio and video formats with the top four commercial products being RealPlayer, Windows Media Player, MP3 and QuickTime. The distribution of the stored playout durations of streaming audio and video clips are long-tailed. More than half of the streaming media clips encountered are video, encoded primarily for broadband connections and at resolutions considerably smaller than the resolutions of typical monitors.
9337355
Weather forecasting: predicting performance for streaming video over wireless LANs
The growth of wireless LANs has brought the expectation for high-bitrate streaming video to wireless PCs. However, it remains unclear how wireless channel characteristics impact the quality of streaming video sent over wireless LANs. This paper presents results from experiments that stream commercial video over a wireless campus network. By analyzing the streaming video quality and capturing wireless LAN characteristics across network and wireless link layers, "weather forecasts" are created such that selected wireless LAN performance indicators might be used to predict the streaming video quality. Furthermore, a quantified measurement of accuracy is presented to evaluate the effectiveness of individual weather forecasts. The paper evaluates six distinct weather forecasts four different streaming configurations including TCP and UDP streaming, and single and multiple-level encoded videos. The results show that the wireless Received Signal Strength Indicator (RSSI) and average wireless link capacity are the most accurate indicators to predict the performance of streaming video over wireless LANs. The weather forecast philosophy can be beneficial for adapting video streaming in wireless LAN environments.
12676409
Measurements of the congestion responsiveness of windows streaming media
While previous research has shown that streaming media can respond to network congestion, it is not known to what extent commercial products are responsive. This research characterizes the bitrate response of Windows Streaming Media (WSM) to changes in network capacity and loss rate. A streaming media test bed was built to systematically vary network and content encoding characteristics and measure WSM congestion responsiveness. The results demonstrate that WSM improve response to congestion when content is encoded into several bitrates by the content provider.
28457841
The Power of the Queue
Queues, stacks, and tapes are basic concepts that have direct applications in compiler design and the general design of algorithms. Whereas stacks (pushdown store or last-in–first-out storage) have been thoroughly investigated and are well understood, this is much less the case for queues (first-in-first-out storage). In this paper a comprehensive study comparing queues to stacks and tapes (off-line and with a one-way input tape) is presented. The techniques used rely on Kolmogorov complexity. In particular, one queue and one tape (or stack) are incomparable: (1) Simulating one stack (and hence one tape) by one queue requires $\Omega (n^{4/3} /\log n)$ time in both the deterministic and the nondeterministic cases. A corollary of this lower bound states that for this model of one-queue machines, nondeterministic linear time is not closed under complement. (2) Simulating one queue by one tape requires $\Omega (n^2 )$ time in the deterministic case and requires $\Omega (n^{4/3}/(\log n)^{2/3} )$ in the nonde...
7274224
Wrapping MPI-based legacy codes as Java/CORBA components
Abstract Techniques for wrapping an MPI-based molecular dynamics (MD) simulation code as Java/CORBA components, for use within a distributed component based problem solving environment (CB-PSE), is presented. A legacy code for simulating a Lennard–Jones fluid is first wrapped as a single CORBA object, followed by division of the code into computational sub-units, where each sub-unit is wrapped as a CORBA object containing MPI calls, and run on a cluster of workstations — enabling different MPI implementations to inter-operate. Using a Java implementation, users can submit simulation tasks through a Web based interface, without needing to know implementation details of the legacy code, or the exact interaction between sub-units within the code. We provide performance comparisons of wrapping the entire MD code as a single object versus wrapping sub-units within it, and offer a simple performance model to explain our findings.
1687904
PGGA: A predictable and grouped genetic algorithm for job scheduling
This paper presents a predictable and grouped genetic algorithm (PGGA) for job scheduling. The novelty of the PGGA is two-fold: (1) a job workload estimation algorithm is designed to estimate a job workload based on its historical execution records and (2) the divisible load theory (DLT) is employed to predict an optimal fitness value by which the PGGA speeds up the convergence process in searching a large scheduling space. Comparison with traditional scheduling methods, such as first-come-first-serve (FCFS) and random scheduling, heuristics, such as a typical genetic algorithm, Min-Min and Max-Min indicates that the PGGA is more effective and efficient in finding optimal scheduling solutions.
22789743
New Applications of the Incompressibility Method
The incompressibility method is an elementary yet powerful proof technique based on Kolmogorov complexity [13]. We show that it is particularly suited to obtain average-case computational complexity lower bounds. Such lower bounds have been difficult to obtain in the past by other methods. In this paper we present four new results and also give four new proofs of known results to demonstrate the power and elegance of the new method.
41518374
Longest cycles in regular 2-connected claw-free graphs
In this paper, we show that every 2-connected, k-regular claw-free graph on n vertices contains a cycle of length at least min 4k?2, n (k?8), and this result is best possible.