17927523
An energy-efficient and access latency optimized indexing scheme for wireless data broadcast
Data broadcast is an attractive data dissemination method in mobile environments. To improve energy efficiency, existing air indexing schemes for data broadcast have focused on reducing tuning time only, i.e., the duration that a mobile client stays active in data accesses. On the other hand, existing broadcast scheduling schemes have aimed at reducing access latency through nonflat data broadcast to improve responsiveness only. Not much work has addressed the energy efficiency and responsiveness issues concurrently. This paper proposes an energy-efficient indexing scheme called MHash that optimizes tuning time and access latency in an integrated fashion. MHash reduces tuning time by means of hash-based indexing and enables nonflat data broadcast to reduce access latency. The design of hash function and the optimization of bandwidth allocation are investigated in depth to refine MHash. Experimental results show that, under skewed access distribution, MHash outperforms state-of-the-art air indexing schemes and achieves access latency close to optimal broadcast scheduling
16349513
Analysis of Replica Placement under Expiration-Based Consistency Management
Expiration-based consistency management is widely used to keep replicated contents up-to-date in the Internet. The effectiveness of replication can be characterized by the communication costs of client accesses and consistency management. Both costs depend on the locations of the replicas. This paper investigates the problem of placing replicas in a network where replica consistency is managed by the expiration-based scheme. Our objective is to minimize the total cost of client accesses and consistency management. By analyzing the communication cost of recursive validations for cascaded replicas, we prove that in the optimal placement scheme, the nodes not assigned replicas induce a connected subgraph that includes the origin server. Our results are generic in that they apply to any request arrival patterns. Based on the analysis, an O(D)-time algorithm is proposed to compute the optimal placement of the replicas, where D is the sum of the number of descendants over all nodes in the routing tree
16560540
Optimizing static job scheduling in a network of heterogeneous computers
This paper investigates static job scheduling schemes that distribute workload in a network of computers with different speeds. Static schemes involve very low overhead and complexity compared to dynamic schemes, but can still provide significant performance improvement over the case of no load balancing. Optimization techniques are proposed for workload allocation and job dispatching. Workload allocation is modeled as a non-linear optimization problem and solved mathematically. It is shown that allocating a disproportionately high percentage of jobs to the more powerful computers improves system performance. The proposed job dispatching algorithm is an extension of the traditional round-robin scheme. The objective is to reduce burstiness in the job arrival stream to each computer The schemes are evaluated by simulation experiments. Performance results verify their effectiveness in terms of mean response time, mean response ratio, and fairness. The Optimized Round-Robin (ORR) strategy which combines both techniques outperforms other static scheduling algorithms examined.
12151519
QoS-aware replica placement for content distribution
The rapid growth of new information services and business-oriented applications entails the consideration of quality of service (QoS) in content distribution. This paper investigates the QoS-aware replica placement problems for responsiveness QoS requirements. We consider two classes of service models: replica-aware services and replica-blind services. In replica-aware services, the servers are aware of the locations of replicas and can therefore optimize request routing to improve responsiveness. We show that the QoS-aware placement problem for replica-aware services is NP-complete. Several heuristic algorithms for fast computation of good solutions are proposed and experimentally evaluated. In replica-blind services, the servers are not aware of the locations of replicas or even their existence. As a result, each replica only serves the requests flowing through it under some given routing strategy. We show that there exist polynomial optimal solutions to the QoS-aware placement problem for replica-blind services. Efficient algorithms are proposed to compute the optimal locations of replicas under different cost models.
11016588
Optimal hash routing for Web proxies
Hash routing is an effective approach for coordinating a collection of Web proxies. In this paper, we present a comprehensive analytical model for hash routing which takes into consideration a number of factors: the original request distribution, the object allocation strategy, the speeds of the proxies and cache hit ratios. Based on this model, the optimal hash routing problems for static and dynamic client configurations are investigated. Two schemes, OBJ-OPT (OBJect OPTimization) and OBJ/DNS-OPT (OBJect and Domain Name Server OPTimization), are proposed to reduce the response times of Web requests. OBJ-OPT optimizes object allocation under a static client configuration, and OBJ/DNS-OPT optimizes both object and DNS allocations under a dynamic client configuration. Extensive trace-driven simulations have been conducted to evaluate the proposed schemes. The results show that they significantly outperform the intuitive scheme based only on the speeds of the proxies.
20193865
Adaptive hash routing for a cluster of client-side web proxies
Hash routing reduces cache misses for a cluster of web proxies by eliminating the duplication of cache contents. In this paper, we investigate the optimization of hash routing performance by dynamically adapting object and DNS allocations to the traffic pattern. An analytical model is developed for hash routing that takes into consideration the original request distribution, the object allocation strategy, the speeds of the proxies and the cache hit ratios. Based on this model, the optimal hash routing problem is studied. The analytical results are applied to the design of two adaptive hash routing schemes: ADA-OBJ optimizes object allocation under static client configuration, and ADA-OBJ/DNS optimizes both object and DNS allocations under dynamic client configuration. Trace-driven simulation experiments have been conducted to evaluate the performance of the proposed schemes. The results show that they significantly outperform the intuitive static hash routing scheme based only on the speeds of the proxies.
7128107
Biasing Samplers to Improve Motion Planning Performance
With the success of randomized sampling-based motion planners such as probabilistic roadmap methods, much work has been done to design new sampling techniques and distributions. To date, there is no sampling technique that outperforms all other techniques for all motion planning problems. Instead, each proposed technique has different strengths and weaknesses. However, little work has been done to combine these techniques to create new distributions. In this paper, we propose to bias one sampling distribution with another such that the resulting distribution out-performs either of its parent distributions. We present a general framework for biasing samplers that is easily extendable to new distributions and can handle an arbitrary number of parent distributions by chaining them together. Our experimental results show that by combining distributions, we can out-perform existing planners. Our results also indicate that not one single distribution combination performs the best in all problems, and we identify which perform better for the specific application domains studied
3257079
Face sketch recognition
Automatic retrieval of face images from police mug-shot databases is critically important for law enforcement agencies. It can effectively help investigators to locate or narrow down potential suspects. However, in many cases, a photo image of a suspect is not available and the best substitute is often a sketch drawing based on the recollection of an eyewitness. We present a novel photo retrieval system using face sketches. By transforming a photo image into a sketch, we reduce the difference between photo and sketch significantly, thus allowing effective matching between the two. Experiments over a data set containing 188 people clearly demonstrate the efficacy of the algorithm.
9601629
Tools for Simulating and Analyzing RNA Folding Kinetics
It has recently been found that some RNA functions are determined by the actual folding kinetics and not just the RNA's nucleotide sequence or its native structure. We present new computational tools for simulating and analyzing RNA folding kinetic metrics such as population kinetics, folding rates, and the folding of particular subsequences. Our method first builds an approximate representation (called a map) of the RNA's folding energy landscape, and then uses specialized analysis techniques to extract folding kinetics from the map. We provide a new sampling strategy called Probabilistic Boltzmann Sampling (PBS) that enables us to approximate the folding landscape with much smaller maps, typically by several orders of magnitude. We also describe a new analysis technique, Map-based Monte Carlo (MMC) simulation, to stochastically extract folding pathways from the map. We demonstrate that our technique can be applied to large RNA (e.g., 200+ nucleotides), where representing the full landscape is infeasible, and that our tools provide results comparable to other simulation methods that work on complete energy landscapes. We present results showing that our approach computes the same relative functional rates as seen in experiments for the relative plasmid replication rates of ColE1 RNAII and its mutants, and for the relative gene expression rates of MS2 phage RNA and its mutants.
6097645
Simulating Protein Motions with Rigidity Analysis
Protein motions, ranging from molecular flexibility to large-scale conformational change, play an essential role in many biochemical processes. Despite the explosion in our knowledge of structural and functional data, our understanding of protein movement is still very limited. In previous work, we developed and validated a motion planning based method for mapping protein folding pathways from unstructured conformations to the native state. In this paper, we propose a novel method based on rigidity theory to sample conformation space more effectively, and we describe extensions of our framework to automate the process and to map transitions between specified conformations. Our results show that these additions both improve the accuracy of our maps and enable us to study a broader range of motions for larger proteins. For example, we show that rigidity-based sampling results in maps that capture subtle folding differences between protein G and its mutants, NuG1 and NuG2, and we illustrate how our technique can be used to study large-scale conformational changes in calmodulin, a 148 residue signaling protein known to undergo conformational changes when binding to Ca(2+). Finally, we announce our web-based protein folding server which includes a publicly available archive of protein motions: (http://parasol.tamu.edu/foldingserver/).
1083190
Streaming media caching algorithms for transcoding proxies
Streaming media is expected to become one of the most popular types of Web content in the future. Due to increasing variety of client devices and the range of access speeds to the Internet, multimedia contents may be required to be transcoded to match the client's capability. With transcoding, both the network and the proxy CPU are potential bottlenecks for streaming media delivery. This paper discusses and compares various caching algorithms designed for transcoding proxies. In particular we propose a new adaptive algorithm that dynamically selects an appropriate metric for adjusting the management policy. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm significantly outperforms those that cache only untranscoded or only transcoded objects. Moreover motivated by the characteristics of many video compression algorithms, we investigate partitioning a video object into sections based on frame type and handling them individually for proxy caching. It is found that partitioning improves performance when CPU power rather than network bandwidth is the limiting resource, particularly when the reference pattern is not highly skewed.