6442183
Routing with a Markovian Metric to Promote Local Mixing
Routing protocols have traditionally been based on finding shortest paths under certain cost metrics. A conventional routing metric models the cost of a path as the sum of the costs on the constituting links. This paper introduces the concept of a Markovian metric, which models the cost of a path as the cost of the first hop plus the cost of the second hop conditioned on the first hop, and so on. The notion of the Markovian metric is fairly general. It is potentially applicable to scenarios where the cost of sending a packet (or a stream of packets) over a link may depend on the previous hop of the packet (or the stream). Such scenario arises, for instance, in a wireless mesh network equipped with local mixing, a recent link layer advance. This scenario is examined as a case study for the Markovian metric. The local mixing engine sits between the routing and MAC layers. It maintains information about the packets each neighbor has, and identifies opportunities to mix the outgoing packets via network coding to reduce the transmissions in the air. We use a Markovian metric to model the reduction of channel resource consumption due to local mixing. This leads to routing decisions that can better take advantage of local mixing. We have implemented a system that incorporates local mixing and source routing using a Markovian metric in Qualnet. The experimental results demonstrate significant throughput gain and resource saving.
11461597
A unification of network coding and tree-packing (routing) theorems
Given a network of lossless links with rate constraints, a source node, and a set of destination nodes, the multicast capacity is the maximum rate at which the source can transfer common information to the destinations. The multicast capacity cannot exceed the capacity of any cut separating the source from a destination; the minimum of the cut capacities is called the cut bound. A fundamental theorem in graph theory by Edmonds established that if all nodes other than the source are destinations, the cut bound can be achieved by routing. In general, however, the cut bound cannot be achieved by routing. Ahlswede et al. established that the cut bound can be achieved by performing network coding, which generalizes routing by allowing information to be mixed. This paper presents a unifying theorem that includes Edmonds' theorem and Ahlswede et al.'s theorem as special cases. Specifically, it shows that the multicast capacity can still be achieved even if information mixing is only allowed on edges entering relay nodes. This unifying theorem is established via a graph theoretic hardwiring theorem, together with the network coding theorems for multicasting. The proof of the hardwiring theorem implies a new proof of Edmonds' theorem.
15778343
Smart rebinning for compression of concentric mosaics
Concentric mosaics offer a quick solution to construct a virtual copy of a real environment, and navigate in the virtual environment. However, the huge amount of data associated with concentric mosaics is a heavy burden for its application. A 3D wavelet transform-based compressor has been proposed in previous work to compress the concentric mosaics. In this paper, we greatly improve the performance of the 3D wavelet coder with a data rearrangement mechanism called “smart rebinning”. The proposed scheme first aligns the concentric mosaic image shots along the horizontal direction and then rebins the shots into multi-perspective panoramas. Smart rebinning greatly improves the cross shot correlation and enables the coder to better explore the redundancy among shots. Experimental results show that the performance of the 3D wavelet coder improves an average of 4.3dB with the use of smart rebinning. The proposed coder outperforms MPEG-2 coding of concentric mosaics by an average of 3.7dB.
8668229
Bounding the power rate function of wireless ad hoc networks
Given a wireless ad hoc network and an end-to-end traffic pattern, the power rate function refers to the minimum total power required to support different throughput under a layered model of wireless networks. A critical notion of the layered model is the realizable graphs, which describe possible hit-rate supplies on the links by the physical and medium access layers. Under the layered model, the problem of finding the power rate function can he transformed into finding the minimum-power realizable graph that can provide a given throughput. We introduce a usage conflict graph to represent the conflicts among different uses of the wireless medium. Testing the realizability of a given graph can be transformed into finding the (vertex) chromatic number, i.e., the minimum number of colors required in a proper vertex-coloring, of the associated usage conflict graph. Based on an upper bound of the chromatic number, we propose a linear program that outputs an upper bound of the power rate function. A lower bound of the chromatic number is the clique number. We propose a systematic way of identifying cliques based on a geometric analysis of the space sharing among active links. This leads to another linear program, which yields a lower bound of the power rate function. We further apply greedy vertex-coloring to fine tune the bounds. Simulations results demonstrate that the obtained bounds are tight in the low power and low rate regime.
1702698
Rendering of 3D-wavelet-compressed concentric mosaic scenery with progressive inverse wavelet synthesis (PIWS)
The concentric mosaics offer a quick solution to the construction and navigation of a virtual environment. To reduce the vast data amount of the concentric mosaics, a compression scheme based on 3D wavelet transform has been proposed in a previous paper. In this work, we investigate the efficient implementation of the renderer. It is preferable not to expand the compressed bitstream as a whole, so that the memory consumption of the renderer can be reduced. Instead, only the data necessary to render the current view are accessed and decoded. The progressive inverse wavelet synthesis (PIWS) algorithm is proposed to provide the random data access and to reduce the calculation for the data access requests to a minimum. A mixed cache is used in PIWS, where the entropy decoded wavelet coefficient, intermediate result of lifting and fully synthesized pixel are all stored at the same memory unit because of the in- place calculation property of the lifting implementation. PIWS operates with a finite state machine, where each memory unit is attached with a state to indicate what type of content is currently stored. The computational saving achieved by PIWS is demonstrated with extensive experiment results.
487639
Intelligent Multi-hop Video Communications
In this paper, we study an intelligent multi-hop communications architecture for quality video delivery over networks. The key to this architecture is the insertion of relays with different levels of intelligence along the end-to-end path that coordinate with each other and the end-systems. We study traffic management and content adaptation within this architecture. Compared with the end-to-end model, the multi-hop model can achieve higher throughput without increasing the risk of overloading the network and the end-to-end delay. Experimental results show a throughput gain of 19.3% on a concatenation of two best-effort networks, and 37.8% for a concatenation of a best-effort network and a guaranteed service network. With the error withdrawal feature at the relay, abrupt quality drops are avoided. Analysis and simulations suggest that the multi-hop traffic management can gain high throughput, and the content adaptation should be sender-centric with occasional relay supports.
2511721
Fractal Modeling of IP Network Traffic at Streaming Speeds
This paper describes how to fit fractal models, online, on IP traffic data streams. Our approach relies on maintaining a sketch of the data stream and fitting straight lines: it yields algorithms that are fast, space-efficient, and accurate. We implemented our methods in AT&T’s Gigascope data stream management system, to demonstrate their practicality at streaming line speeds.
594928
Graph based analysis of 2-D FPGA routing
In this paper, we study the two-dimensional FPGA, Xilinx-like routing architectures and present the first known computational complexity results for them. The routing problem is formulated as a two-dimensional interval packing problem and is proved to be NP-complete with or without doglegs. Next, we consider other routing structures obtained from the industrial one by arbitrarily changing switch box connection topology while maintaining the same connection flexibility. There is an exponentially large number of such routing structures. We further prove that there does not exist a better routing architecture among the members of this large domain. In addition, we prove that there is no constant bound on the mapping ratio of a track number required by a detailed routing to a global routing channel density for the studied architectures. Finally, we show two directions of changing the routing architectures which yield polynomial time mapping solutions and constant bounded mapping ratios. Our theoretical analysis is intended to give some insight to, and understanding of this new routing problem's fundamental properties.
14112648
Reduction design for generic universal switch blocks
A k-side switch block with W terminals per side is said to be a universal switch block ((k, W)-USB) if every set of the nets satisfying the routing constraint (i.e., the number of nets on each side is at most W) is simultaneously routable through the switch block. The (4, W)-USB was originated by designing better switch modules for 2-D FPGAs, such as Xilinx XC4000-type FPGAs, whereas the generic USBs can be applied in multidimensional or some nonconventional 2-D FPGA architectures. The problem we study in this article is to design (k, W)-USBs with the minimum number of switches for any given pair of (k, W). We provide graph models for routing requirements and switch blocks and develop a series of decomposition theorems for routing requirements with the help of a new graph model. The powerful decomposition theory leads to the automatic generation of routing requirements and a detailed routing algorithm, as well as the reduction design method of building large USBs by smaller ones. As a result, we derive a class of well-structured and highly scalable optimum (k, W)-USBs for k ≤ 6, or even Ws, and near-optimum (k, W)-USBs for k ≥ 7 and odd Ws. We also give routing experiments to justify the routing improvement upon the entire chip using the USBs. The results demonstrate the usefulness of USBs.
1673387
Two-Stage Optimal Component Analysis
Linear representations are widely used to reduce dimension in applications involving high dimensional data. While specialized procedures exist for certain optimality criteria, such as principle component analysis (PCA) and Fisher discriminant analysis (FDA), they can not be generalized for more general criteria. To overcome this fundamental limitation, optimal component analysis (OCA) uses a stochastic gradient optimization procedure intrinsic to the manifold giving by the constraints of applications and therefore gives a procedure for finding optimal representations for general criteria. However, due to its generality nature, OCA often requires extensive computation for gradient estimation and updating. To significantly reduce the required computation, in this paper, we propose a two-stage method by first reducing the dimension of input to a smaller one (but larger than the final resulting dimension) using a computationally efficient method and then performing OCA in the reduced space. This reduces the computation time from days to minutes on widely used databases, making OCA learning feasible for many applications. Additionally, since the reduced space is much smaller, the stochastic gradient optimization tends to be more efficient. We illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed method on face classification.
16588936
Identifying important concepts from medical documents
Automated medical concept recognition is important for medical informatics such as medical document retrieval and text mining research. In this paper, we present a software tool called keyphrase identification program (KIP) for identifying topical concepts from medical documents. KIP combines two functions: noun phrase extraction and keyphrase identification. The former automatically extracts noun phrases from medical literature as keyphrase candidates. The latter assigns weights to extracted noun phrases for a medical document based on how important they are to that document and how domain specific they are in the medical domain. The experimental results show that our noun phrase extractor is effective in identifying noun phrases from medical documents, so is the keyphrase extractor in identifying important medical conceptual terms. They both performed better than the systems they were compared to.