15200958
A scheme for integrating e-services in establishing virtual enterprises
An important aspect of business to business e-commerce is the agile virtual enterprise (VE). VEs are established when existing enterprises dynamically form temporary alliances, joining their business in order to share their costs, skills and resources in supporting certain activities. Currently, existing enterprises use workflows to automate their operation and integrate their information systems and human resources. Thus, the establishment of a VE has been viewed as a problem of dynamically expanding and integrating workflows. We present an approach to combining workflows from different enterprises, using techniques developed in the artificial intelligence literature on planning. Our method takes two workflow views, one representing a service request and the other a service provision (advertisement), with a mix of vital and nonvital steps and a rich set of constraints, and returns a list of possible legal combinations, if any exist. It then uses plan-merging techniques to find potential conflicts between the two workflows, and to suggest additional constraints that can resolve the conflicts. The returned solutions represent terms for the establishment of a new VE, and can be evaluated by each side to determine which is most desirable.
40446138
A distributed hierarchical management framework for heterogeneous WANs
The scope of network management is expanding in multiple dimensions. Local area networks (LANs) have more nodes than ever before, enterprise networks span national boundaries, wide area networks (WANs) cover the globe, and administrators want to manage their LANs all the way down to a PC’s network interface and application software. In order to centrally manage these networks, the network manager faces the complexity of heterogeneous management tools and the difficulty of managing vast amount of data generated by network elements.
30095382
Performance Analysis of Generalized Selective Packet Discarding Schemes
Selective packet discarding schemes have been mostly developed and analyzed in the context of ATM networks. However, similar schemes could be applied to non-ATM or more general networks. The analysis of selective packet discarding schemes in a general packet switching environment has been limited to the basic dropping schemes, i.e., Partial Packet Discard (PPD) and Early Packet Discard (EPD), and for only the single traffic source case. In this paper, we extend the mathematical analysis of PPD and EPD for multiple sources and include simulation results to verify the analytical results. Finally, to place the performance of the generalized EPD and PPD in the context of other packet dropping schemes, we also provide simulation results of the Drop from Front (DfF), and preemptive Partial Packet Discard (pPPD) schemes.
13442653
Establishing virtual enterprises by means of mobile agents
Electronic commerce is expanding from the simple notion of electronic stores to the notion of virtual enterprises (VE), where existing enterprises dynamically form temporary alliances, joining their businesses in order to share their costs, skills and resources in supporting certain activities. Two fundamental problems in VE are: (1) how a VE is established, and (2) how information is shared among the VE participants in a controlled and efficient manner. Currently, existing enterprises are using workflows to automate their operations by integrating their information systems and human resources. Thus, in this paper, we view the establishment of a VE as a problem of dynamically expanding and integrating workflows in decentralized, autonomous and interacting workflow management systems. The focus is on the idea of mobile agents called "adlets" and their use in establishing VEs that involves advertising, negotiating and exchanging control information and data as well as its management.
25726525
A survey of TCP-friendly router-based AQM schemes
Although the majority of the traffic over the Internet is still TCP-based, applications such as voice over IP and video-conferencing are changing this very rapidly. While TCP-based applications react to network congestion, UDP-based streaming applications usually do not have any type of flow and congestion control mechanisms. UDP, the transport layer protocol used by audio and video streaming applications, does not react to network congestion thus stealing bandwidth from the responsive TCP-based connections. Several solutions have been suggested to combat this TCP-friendliness problem, mostly applied either in the end systems (end-to-end) at the transport layer of the protocol stack or inside the network (routers) at the network layer. This article surveys the state-of-the-art in router-based mechanisms to address the TCP-friendliness problem and presents a description of the most important algorithms, design issues, advantages and disadvantages, and a performance evaluation. The article also describes ways to estimate the number of active flows traversing a core router and points to further sources on this subject, which is widely used by many mechanisms, including several described in this survey.
14976055
A new token passing distributed mutual exclusion algorithm
Eliminating interference between concurrently executing activities through mutual exclusion is one of the most fundamental problems in computer systems. The problem of mutual exclusion in a distributed system is especially interesting owing to the lack of global knowledge in the presence of variable communication delays. In this paper, a new token-based distributed mutual exclusion algorithm is proposed. The algorithm incurs approximately three messages at high loads, irrespective of the number of nodes N in the system. At low loads, it requires approximately N messages. The paper also addresses failure recovery issues, such as token loss.
14081909
Efficient Bandwidth Guaranteed Restoration Algorithms for Multicast Connections
This paper defines a new restoration strategy for provisioning bandwidth guaranteed recovery for multicast connections in presence of link failures. The new restoration strategy is formulated into a new Integer Linear Programming (ILP) algorithm and is compared with other existing restoration strategies. We also present a new heuristic algorithm based on this new restoration strategy. Results show that our heuristic algorithm performs competitively close to the ILP-based algorithm, and is more bandwidth efficient than other existing heuristic algorithms that are based on different restoration strategies.
15037541
Power-performance trade-off using pipeline delays
We study the delays faced by instructions in the pipeline of a superscalar processor and its impact on power and performance. Instructions that are ready-on-dispatch (ROD) are normally delayed in the issue stage due to resource constraints even though their data dependencies are satisfied. These delays are reduced by issuing ROD instructions earlier than normal and executing them on slow functional units to obtain power benefits. This scheme achieves around 6% to 8% power reduction with average performance degradation of about 2%. Alternatively, instead of reducing the delays faced by instructions in the pipeline, increasing them by deliberately stalling certain instructions at appropriate times minimizes the duration for which the processor is underutilized leading to 2.5-4% power savings with less than 0.3% performance degradation.
16760269
Implementing XML Schema inside a relational database
XML Schema has emerged as a promising data model that unites structured and unstructured content. The Oracle database has led the commercial database community in integrating support for XML Schema inside an enterprise data server. The foundation for this was laid with the absorption of the SQL:1999 'objectrelational' type system in the database, which provided the necessary hierarchical abstractions necessary for representing XML. We look at how XML Schemas have been implemented in Oracle XML DB, what optimizations are available to cover the diverse use-cases for schema-based XML storage and retrieval, and how this technology contributes to richer data management.
14357613
Construction of an efficient overlay multicast infrastructure for real-time applications
This paper presents an overlay architecture where service providers deploy a set of service nodes (called MSNs) in the network to efficiently implement media-streaming applications. These MSNs are organized into an overlay and act as application-layer multicast forwarding entities for a set of clients. We present a decentralized scheme that organizes the MSNs into an appropriate overlay structure that is particularly beneficial for real-time applications. We formulate our optimization criterion as a "degree-constrained minimum average-latency problem" which is known to be NP-hard. A key feature of this formulation is that it gives a dynamic priority to different MSNs based on the size of its service set. Our proposed approach iteratively modifies the overlay tree using localized transformations to adapt with changing distribution of MSNs, clients, as well as network conditions. We show that a centralized greedy approach to this problem does not perform quite as well, while our distributed iterative scheme efficiently converges to near-optimal solutions.
5736729
VoIP on Wireless Meshes: Models, Algorithms and Evaluation
We study the problem of supporting VoIP calls in a wireless mesh network. Specifically, we propose solutions for call admission control (CAC) and route selection for VoIP calls. Call admission decisions must evaluate how the capacity of the mesh network is utilized by the existing calls. We address this issue via a measurement-based modeling effort to model mutual interference between wireless links. The modeling approach evaluates whether capacity constraints (or, required QoS metrics) will be satisfied if a new call is admitted with a given route. Evaluations with a 6-node 802.11a testbed demonstrate excellent accuracy of the model and thus also the CAC performance. We address the issue of route selection by also using a modeling approach that considers models of transmission and interference ranges to develop a polynomial-time algorithm to search for feasible routes. This problem takes exponential time for wireless networks without such modeling. In addition to studying feasibility, we study several routing metrics such as shortest feasible path and maximum residual feasible path. Finally, we develop a new method for routing using call statistics that uses prior calling patterns to avoid potentially critical links. We evaluate the performance of these route selection techniques via extensive simulations and demonstrate the superiority of using max residual feasible path over simply shortest feasible path, and routing using call statistics over max residual feasible path.