14347517
A Tiered System for Serving Differentiated Content
Contemporary Web sites typically consist of front–end Web servers, application servers, and back-end information systems such as database servers. There has been limited research on how to provide overload control and service differentiation for the back-end systems. In this paper we propose an architecture called tiered service (TS) for these purposes. In TS, there are several heterogeneous back-end systems to serve the Web applications. The Web applications communicate with a routing intermediary to intelligently route the queries to the appropriate back-end servers based on various policies such as client profiles and server load. In our system the back ends may store different qualities of data; lower quality data typically requires less overhead to serve. The main contributions of this paper include (i) a tiered content replication scheme that replicates tiered qualities of data on heterogeneous back ends with different capacity to satisfy clients with diverse requirements for latency and quality of data, and (ii) an application-transparent query routing architecture that automatically routes the queries to the appropriate back ends. The architecture was implemented in our test bed, and its performance was benchmarked. The experimental results demonstrate that TS offers significant performance improvement.
8488192
Session-based overload control in QoS-aware Web servers
With the explosive use of the Internet, contemporary Web servers are susceptible to overloads and their services deteriorate drastically and often cause denial of services. In this paper, we propose two methods to prevent and control overloads in Web servers by utilizing the session-based relationship among HTTP requests. We first exploited the dependence among session-based requests by analyzing and predicting the reference patterns. Using the dependency relationships, we have derived traffic conformation functions that can be used for capacity planning and overload prevention in Web servers. Second, we have proposed a dynamic weighted fair sharing (DWFS) scheduling algorithm to control overloads in Web servers. DWFS is distinguished from other scheduling algorithms in the sense that it aims to avoid processing of requests that belong to sessions that are likely to be aborted in the near future. The experimental results demonstrate that DWFS can improve server responsiveness by as high as 50% while providing QoS support through service differentiation for a class of application environment.
22537497
ACES: An efficient admission control scheme for QoS-aware web servers
The unpredictability of server response performance hinders the advance of new application on the Internet. In this paper, we present an efficient admission control algorithm, ACES, based on the server workload characteristics. The admission control algorithm ensures the bounded response time from a web server by periodical allocation of system resources according to the resource requirements of incoming tasks. By rejecting requests exceeding server capacity, the response performance of the server is well maintained even under high system utilization. The resource requirements of tasks are estimated based on their types. A double-queue structure is implemented to reduce the effects caused by estimation inaccuracy, and to exploit the spare capacity of the server, thus increasing the system throughput. The admission control algorithm can be used for server overload control and for QoS provisioning of service differentiating Internet servers. Response delays of accepted tasks are bounded by the desired predefined time period. Theoretical analyses and experimental studies show that the ACES algorithm provides desirable throughput and bounded response delay to the tasks, without any significant impact on the aggregate throughput performance of the system under various workload situations.
7847310
The Finite Element Method for Computing the Stationary Distribution of an SRBM in a Hypercube with Applications to Finite Buffer Queueing Networks
This paper proposes an algorithm, referred to as BNAfm (Brownian network analyzer with finite element method), for computing the stationary distribution of a semimartingale reflecting Brownian motion (SRBM) in a hypercube. The SRBM serves as an approximate model of queueing networks with finite buffers. Our BNAfm algorithm is based on the finite element method and an extension of a generic algorithm developed by Dai and Harrison [14]. It uses piecewise polynomials to form an approximate subspace of an infinite-dimensional functional space. The BNAfm algorithm is shown to produce good estimates for stationary probabilities, in addition to stationary moments. This is in contrast to the BNAsm algorithm (Brownian network analyzer with spectral method) of Dai and Harrison [14], which uses global polynomials to form the approximate subspace and which sometimes fails to produce meaningful estimates of these stationary probabilities. Extensive computational experiences from our implementation are reported, which may be useful for future numerical research on SRBMs. A three-station tandem network with finite buffers is presented to illustrate the effectiveness of the Brownian approximation model and our BNAfm algorithm.
16942431
A graph model for E-commerce recommender systems
Information overload on the Web has created enormous challenges to customers selecting products for online purchases and to online businesses attempting to identify customers' preferences efficiently. Various recommender systems employing different data representations and recommendation methods are currently used to address these challenges. In this research, we developed a graph model that provides a generic data representation and can support different recommendation methods. To demonstrate its usefulness and flexibility, we developed three recommendation methods: direct retrieval, association mining, and high-degree association retrieval. We used a data set from an online bookstore as our research test-bed. Evaluation results showed that combining product content information and historical customer transaction information achieved more accurate predictions and relevant recommendations than using only collaborative information. However, comparisons among different methods showed that high-degree association retrieval did not perform significantly better than the association mining method or the direct retrieval method in our test-bed.
9860639
Analysis of parallel algorithms for finding a maximal independent set in a random hypergraph
It is well known 9] that nding a maximal independent set in a graph is in class N C, and 10] that nding a maximal independent set in a hypergraph with xed dimension is in RN C. It is not known whether this latter problem remains in N C when the dimension is part of the input. We will study the problem when the problem instances are randomly chosen. It was shown in 6] that the expected running time of a simple parallel algorithm for nding the lexicographically rst maximal independent set (lfmis) in a random simple graph is logarithmic in the input size. In this paper, we will prove a generalization of this result. We show that if a random k-uniform hypergraph has vertex set f1; 2; : : : ; ng and its edges are chosen independently with probability p from the set of ? n k possible edges, then our algorithm nds the lfmis
43818812
Piecewise linear modulation model of handwriting
A new piecewise linear modulation model of handwriting is proposed. In this model, the velocity of handwriting trajectory is modeled as the impulse response of a time varying second order system. For mathematical tractability, the entire trajectory is segmented into several non-overlapping frames, while the natural frequency and the damping factor of the system are assumed to vary linearly with time in each frame and are continuous along the entire trajectory. In other words, handwriting is regarded as an oscillation modulated by a continuous and piecewise linear signal. The parameters of this model are estimated by Powell's optimization algorithm which does not require the computation of the first order derivative. The number and lengths of the frames are decided by a modified binary search algorithm along with the estimation of parameters. This model has achieved very high data compression rate as well as accurate reproduction of real handwriting.
15665012
Progressive auction based resource allocation in service-oriented architecture
The emerging paradigm of distributed Web services has promised seamless business integration across the Internet that shares not only computing power but also applications. One major challenge is resource allocation to each end user in an economically efficient and low latency manner. A common solution is proportional sharing where each user gets his resource in proportion to the predetermined weight. However, this does not allow users to differentiate the value of their services and to dynamically adjust the weights. A resource reservation mechanism may improve the information and service sharing but usually introduces a high latency. In this paper, we propose a progressive auction based market mechanism for resource allocation that allows user differentiation of the service value and ensures the resource acquisition latency to be limited only to the communication delay in service-oriented architecture (SOA) systems. We present a service sharing prototype for selecting services for further business process composition or solution creation and show experimental results on the formation of reliable user ranking in resource sharing through the progressive auction.