36077313
Developing High-Performance Parallel Applications Using EPAS
In spite of the advent of high performance parallel computers and commodity clusters, complexity of parallel application development remains one of the major obstacles towards the mainstream adoption of parallel computing. Researchers are constantly investigating different approaches to reduce parallel application development time and increase productivity. As re-usable components, patterns have gained popularity in the sequential programming domain. Subsequently, several pattern-based parallel programming environments (PPEs) have been proposed to facilitate parallel application development procedure. Unfortunately, most of these PPEs lack the required flexibility in order to develop real-life parallel applications. In this paper, we describe the features of the EPAS (Extended Parallel Architectural Skeleton) PPE that enables development of complex parallel applications. We investigate and design the required patterns, and then use them to develop a parallel data cube computing application. Finally, we present the performance of the developed applications and discuss the results.
415324
Mobility information for resource management in wireless ATM networks
User mobility poses a significant technical challenge to network resource management in wireless ATM (Asynchronous Transfer Mode) networks. In order to guarantee quality of service (QoS) to mobile users and to achieve a high efficiency in network resource management, the information of mobile users' handoff at a future moment is essential for statistical multiplexing. This paper develops a novel fuzzy logic inference system to estimate the user mobility information for a wireless ATM network which uses a direct sequence code division multiple access (DS/CDMA) protocol. The estimation is based on measured pilot signal strengths from a number of the nearest base stations by the mobile user. Numerical results are presented to demonstrate the performance of the proposed technique under various path losses and channel shadowing conditions. The proposed technique can achieve simplicity, accuracy and low cost.
7313627
Voice capacity analysis of WLAN with unbalanced traffic
An analytical model to study the performance of wireless local area networks (WLANs) supporting asymmetric nonpersistent traffic using the IEEE 802.11 distributed coordination function mode for medium access control (MAC) is developed. Given the parameters of the MAC protocol and voice codecs, the voice capacity of an infrastructure-based WLAN, in terms of the maximum number of voice connections that can be supported with satisfactory user-perceived quality, is obtained. In addition, voice capacity analysis reveals how the overheads from different layers, codec rate, and voice packetization interval affect voice traffic performance in WLANs, which provides an important guideline for network planning and management. The analytical results can be used for effective call admission control to guarantee the quality of voice connections. Extensive simulations have been performed to validate the analytical results
11389576
Ultra-wideband wireless communications
Summary Ultra-wideband (UWB) communication techniques have attracted a great interest in both academia and industry in the past few years for applications in short-range wireless mobile systems. This is due to the potential advantages of UWB transmissions such as low power, high rate, immunity to multipath propagation, less complex transceiver hardware, and low interference. However, tremendous R&D efforts are required to face various technical challenges in developing UWB wireless systems, including UWB channel characterization, transceiver design, coexistence and interworking with other narrowband wireless systems, design of the link and network layers to benefit from UWB transmission characteristics. This paper is to provide an overview of UWB communications, summarize the previous research results, and identify further research issues that need to be tackled. The emphasis is placed on the commercial wireless communications. Copyright # 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
9894542
Reliability optimization of distributed access networks with constrained total cost
In this paper, we study the system reliability optimization of distributed access networks subject to a constraint on the total cost. We first formulate the cost-constrained system reliability optimization problem as a searching process in a combinatorial tree, which enumerates all the possible solutions to the problem. Because the calculation of each possible solution for the reliability problem is extremely time-consuming, a novel algorithm, the Shrinking & Searching Algorithm (SSA), is proposed to speed up the searching process. SSA jointly considers the upper bound of the system reliability for each branch in the combinatorial tree, and the cost constraint on the possible solutions. It avoids most of the redundant calculations in the searching process by gradually shrinking the difference between lower & upper bounds of the length of a path in the corresponding combinatorial tree, which represents a feasible solution. Case study & simulation results are presented to demonstrate the performance of the SSA.
16600319
Update-Based Cache Access and Replacement in Wireless Data Access
Cache has been applied for wireless data access with different replacement policies in wireless networks. Most of the current cache replacement schemes are access-based replacement policies since they are based on object access frequency/recency information. Access-based replacement policies either ignore or do not focus on update information. However, update information is extremely important since it can make access information almost useless. In this paper, we consider two fundamental and strongly consistent access algorithms: poll-per-read (PER) and call-back (CB). We propose a server-based PER (SB-PER) cache access mechanism in which the server makes replacement decisions and a client-based CB cache access mechanism in which clients make replacement decisions. Both mechanisms have been designed to be suitable for using both update frequency and access frequency. We further propose two update-based replacement policies, least access-to-update ratio (LA2U) and least access-to-update difference (LAUD). We provide a thorough performance analysis via extensive simulations for evaluating these algorithms in terms of access rate, update rate, cache size, database size, object size, etc. Our study shows that although effective hit ratio is a better metric than cache hit ratio, it is a worse metric than transmission cost, and a higher effective hit ratio does not always mean a lower cost. In addition, the proposed SB-PER mechanism is better than the original PER algorithm in terms of effective hit ratio and cost, and the update-based policies outperform access-based policies in most cases
9685849
Adaptive data partition for sorting using probability distribution
Many computing problems benefit from dynamic partition of data into smaller chunks with better parallelism and locality. However, it is difficult to partition all types of inputs with the same high efficiency. This paper presents a new partition method in sorting scenario based on probability distribution, an idea first studied by Janus and Lamagna in early 1980's on a mainframe computer. The new technique makes three improvements. The first is a rigorous sampling technique that ensures accurate estimate of the probability distribution. The second is an efficient implementation on modern, cache-based machines. The last is the use of probability distribution in parallel sorting. Experiments show 10-30% improvement in partition balance and 20-70% reduction in partition overhead, compared to two commonly used techniques. The new method reduces the parallel sorting time by 33-50% and outperforms the previous fastest sequential sorting technique by up to 30%.
31888135
An automatic seal imprint verification approach
The automatic verification of seal imprints is a difficult pattern recognition problem and has a lot of applications in the oriental countries. Several approaches have been proposed in the past 10 years, but all of them were hard to implement in practice because of their drawbacks in the adaptability, reliability and practicality. In this paper, a new automatic seal imprint verification approach is presented. Due to the efficient and accurate registration method, a set of effective features and the elaborate implementations, this approach has satisfied most practical requirements and has been used for a practical check verification system in a Chinese bank.
37059740
Realization of an Arbitrary Permutation on a Hypercube
We present an explicit combinatorial algorithm for constructing a 2-realization for any given permutation on a circuit-switched d-dimensional hypercube (d-cube) such that the total number of directed edges used in the realization (counting every repetition) is bounded by d2d, the total number of directed edges in the d-cube. As a corollary, this result implies a (2d−3) step realization on a packet-switched d-cube (d⩾3).
7666408
Equivalent permutation capabilities between time-division optical omega networks and non-optical extra-stage omega networks
Because signals carried by two waveguides entering a common switch element would generate crosstalk, a regular <i>N</i> × <i>N</i> multistage interconnection network (MIN) cannot be directly used as an optical switch between <i>N</i> inputs and <i>N</i> outputs in an optical network. A simple solution is to use a 2<i>N</i> × 2<i>N</i> cube-type MIN to provide the <i>N</i> × <i>N</i> connections, which needs a much larger hardware cost. A recent research proposed another solution, called the time-domain approach, that divides the <i>N</i> optical inputs into several groups such that crosstalk-free connections can be provided by an <i>N</i> × <i>N</i> regular MIN in several time slots, one for each group. Researchers studied this approach on Omega networks and defined the class set θ to be the set of <i>N</i>-permutations realizable in two time slots on an Omega network. They proved that the size of θ is larger than the size of class Ω, where Ω consists of all <i>N</i>-permutations admissible to a regular <i>N</i> × <i>N</i> (nonoptical) Omega network. This paper first presents an optimal <i>O</i>(<i>N</i> log <i>N</i>) time algorithm for identifying whether a given permutation belongs to class θ or not. Using this algorithm, this paper then proves an interesting result that the class θ is identical to the class Ω + 1 which represents the set of <i>N</i>-permutations admissible to a nonoptical <i>N</i> × <i>N</i> one-extra stage Omega network.
872843
Active feedback in ad hoc information retrieval
Information retrieval is, in general, an iterative search process, in which the user often has several interactions with a retrieval system for an information need. The retrieval system can actively probe a user with questions to clarify the information need instead of just passively responding to user queries. A basic question is thus how a retrieval system should propose questions to the user so that it can obtain maximum benefits from the feedback on these questions. In this paper, we study how a retrieval system can perform active feedback, i.e., how to choose documents for relevance feedback so that the system can learn most from the feedback information. We present a general framework for such an active feedback problem, and derive several practical algorithms as special cases. Empirical evaluation of these algorithms shows that the performance of traditional relevance feedback (presenting the top K documents) is consistently worse than that of presenting documents with more diversity. With a diversity-based selection algorithm, we obtain fewer relevant documents, however, these fewer documents have more learning benefits.