16309430
Modeling, Analysis and Improvement for BitTorrent-Like File Sharing Networks
In this paper, a simple mathematical model is presented for studying the performance of the BitTorrent (1) file sharing system. We are especially interested in the distribution of the peers with different states of the download job completedness. With the model we find that in the stable state the distribution of the download peers follows a U-shaped curve, and the parameters such as the departure rate of the seeds and the abort rate of the download peers will influence the peer distribution in different ways notably. We also analyze the file availability and the dying process of the BitTorrent file sharing system. We find that the system's stability deteriorates with the clustering of the peers, and BitTorrent's built-in "tit-for-tat" unchoking strategy could not help to preserve the integrity of the file among the download peers when the size of the community is small. An innovative peer selection strategy which enables more peers to finish the download job and prolongs the system's lifetime is proposed, in which the peers cooperate to improve the stability of the system by making a tradeoff between the current download rate and the future service availability. Finally, experimental results are presented to validate our analysis and findings.
26320424
Aurelia: Building Locality-Preserving Overlay Network over Heterogeneous P2P Environments
Traditional DHT-based overlays destroy data locality and make it hard to support complex queries (e.g., range query, similarity query, etc) in P2P systems. Additionally, the node heterogeneity is widely ignored in most existing overlay designs. In this paper, we propose a locality-preserving overlay design, called Aurelia, which can adapt to the heterogeneous P2P environment and exploit node heterogeneity to realize efficient routing and robust indexing. Aurelia preserves the data locality by abandoning the use of hashing for data placement and each peer is responsible for a continuous range of value. In Aurelia, the routing table size and index range are proportional to the node capacity, and multicasting is adopted for scalable routing table maintenance.
16461681
Analytical Study on Improving DHT Lookup Performance under Churn
The phenomenon of churn degrades the lookup performance of DHT-based P2P systems greatly. To date, a number of approaches have been proposed to handle it from both the system side and the client side. However, there lacks theoretical analysis to direct how to make design choices under different churn levels and how to configure their parameters optimally. In this paper, we analytically study three important aspects on improving DHT lookup performance under churn, i.e., lookup strategy, lookup parallelism and lookup key replication. Our objective is to build a theoretical basis for DHT designers to make better design choices in the future. We first compare the performance of two representative lookup strategies - recursive routing and iterative routing, and explore the existence of better alternatives. Then we show the effectiveness of parallel lookup in systems with different churn levels and how to select the optimal degree of parallelism. Due to the importance of key replication on lookup performance, we also analyze the reliability of replicated keys under two different replication policies, and discuss how to make configuration in different environments. Besides analytical study, our results are also validated by simulation, and Kad is taken as a case to show the meaningfulness of our analysis
1529609
Roogle: Supporting Efficient High-Dimensional Range Queries in P2P Systems
Multi-dimensional range query is an important query type and especially useful when the user doesn't know exactly what he is looking for. However, due to improper indexing method and high routing latency, existing schemes cannot perform well under high-dimensional situations. In this paper, we propose Roogle, a decentralized non-flooding P2P search engine that can efficiently support high-dimensional range queries in P2P systems. Roogle makes improvements on both indexing and routing. The high-dimensional data is indexed based on the maximum or minimum value among all dimensions. This simple indexing method performs rather well under high-dimensional situations and tolerates data points with missing values or different dimensionality. To speed query routing, Roogle is built on top of our proposed structured overlay – Aurelia, which has better routing performance by exploiting node heterogeneity. Aurelia also guarantees the data locality and efficiently support range queries. Experimental results from simulation validate the scalability and efficiency of Roogle.
207751
PIDD: database for Protein Inter-atomic Distance Distributions
Protein Inter-atomic Distance Distributions (PIDD) is a dedicated database and structural bio-informatics system for distance based protein modeling. The database is developed to host and analyze the statistical data for protein inter-atomic distances based on their distributions in databases of known protein structures such as in the Protein Data Bank (PDB). PIDD is capable of generating, caching, and displaying the statistical distributions of the distances of various types and ranges. The collected information can be used to extract geometric restraints or mean-force potentials for protein structure determination including nuclear magnetic resonance structure determination and comparative model refinement. PIDD is supported with a friendly designed web interface so that users can easily specify the distance types and ranges, and retrieve, visualize or download the distributions of the distances as they desire. PIDD is freely accessible at
5599051
Constructivist learning with participatory examinations
Can we improve the examination process, making it more enjoyable and increasing perceived learning? The participatory exam process provides opportunities for students to learn from creating, reading, answering and grading exam questions. An online asynchronous learning network system facilitates the process. This paper presents the process framework, our research model and experimental results. A majority of students preferred the participatory exam and believed that it increased their learning.
912349
Stochastic Inversion Transduction Grammars and Bilingual Parsing of Parallel Corpora
We introduce (1) a novel stochastic inversion transduction grammar formalism for bilingual language modeling of sentence-pairs, and (2) the concept of bilingual parsing with a variety of parallel corpus analysis applications. Aside from the bilingual orientation, three major features distinguish the formalism from the finite-state transducers more traditionally found in computational linguistics: it skips directly to a context-free rather than finite-state base, it permits a minimal extra degree of ordering flexibility, and its probabilistic formulation admits an efficient maximum-likelihood bilingual parsing algorithm. A convenient normal form is shown to exist. Analysis of the formalism's expressiveness suggests that it is particularly well suited to modeling ordering shifts between languages, balancing needed flexibility against complexity constraints. We discuss a number of examples of how stochastic inversion transduction grammars bring bilingual constraints to bear upon problematic corpus analysis tasks such as segmentation, bracketing, phrasal alignment, and parsing.
8762213
An Algorithm for Simultaneously Bracketing Parallel Texts by Aligning Words
We describe a grammarless method for simultaneously bracketing both halves of a parallel text and giving word alignments, assuming only a translation lexicon for the language pair. We introduce inversion-invariant transduction grammars which serve as generative models for parallel bilingual sentences with weak order constraints. Focusing on transduction grammars for bracketing, we formulate a normal form, and a stochastic version amenable to a maximum-likelihood bracketing algorithm. Several extensions and experiments are discussed.
5578183
Learning restricted probabilistic link grammars
We describe a language model employing a new headed-disjuncts formulation of Lafferty et al.'s (1992) probabilistic link grammar, together with (1) an EM training method for estimating the probabilities, and (2) a procedure for learning some simple lexicalized grammar structures. The model in its simplest form is a generalization of n-gram models, but in its general form possesses context-free expressiveness. Unlike the original experiments on probabilistic link grammars, we assume that no hand-coded grammar is initially available (as with n-gram models). We employ untyped links to concentrate the learning on lexical dependencies, and our formulation uses the lexical identities of heads to influence the structure of the parse graph. After learning, the language model consists of grammatical rules in the form of a set of simple disjuncts for each word, plus several sets of probability parameters. The formulation extends cleanly toward learning more powerful context-free grammars. Several issues relating to generalization bias, linguistic constraints, and parameter smoothing are considered. Preliminary experimental results on small artificial corpora are supportive of our approach.