21164331
Optimization model of internet protocols
Layered architecture is one of the most fundamental and influential structures of network design. Can we integrate the various protocol layers into a single coherent theory by regarding them as carrying out an asynchronous distributed primal-dual computation over the network to implicitly solve a global optimization problem? Different layers iterate on different subsets of the decision variables using local information to achieve individual optimalities, but taken together, these local algorithms attempt to achieve a global objective. Such a theory will expose the interconnection between protocol layers and can be used to study rigorously the performance tradeoff in protocol layering as different ways to distribute a centralized computation. In this talk, we describe some preliminary work towards this goal and discuss some of the difficulties of this approach.
5737470
A pragmatic approach to dealing with high-variability in network measurements
The Internet is teeming with high variability phenomena, from measured IP flow sizes to aspects of inferred router-level connectivity, but there still exists considerable debate about how best to deal with this encountered high variability and model it. While one popular approach favors modeling highly variable event sizes with conventional, finite variance distributions such as lognormal or Weibull distributions, Mandelbrot has argued for the last 40 years that there are compelling mathematical, statistical, and practical reasons for why infinite variance distributions are natural candidates for capturing the essence behind high variability phenomena. In this paper, we elaborate on Mandelbrot's arguments and present a methodology that often allows for a clear distinction between the two approaches. In particular, by requiring the resulting models to be resilient to ambiguities (i.e., robust to real-world deficiencies in the underlying network measurements) and internally self-consistent (i.e., insensitive with respect the duration, location, or time of the data collection), we provide a rigorous framework for a qualitative assessment of the observed high variability. We apply the proposed framework to assess previously reported findings about measured Internet traffic and inferred router- and AS-level connectivity. In the process, we also discuss what our approach has to say about recent discussions concerning network traffic being Poisson or self-similar and router-level or AS-level connectivity graphs of the Internet being scale-free or not.
46798
Lookahead Pathologies for Single Agent Search
Admissible and consistent heuristic functions are usually preferred in single-agent heuristic search as they guarantee optimal solutions with complete search methods such as A* and IDA*. Larger problems, however, frequently make a complete search intractable due to space and/or time limitations. In particular, a path-planning agent in a real-time strategy game may need to take an action before its complete search has the time to finish. In such cases, incomplete search techniques (such as RTA*, SRTA*, RTDP, DTA*) can be used. Such algorithms conduct a limited ply lookahead and then evaluate the states envisioned using a heuristic function. The action selected on the basis of such evaluations can be suboptimal due to the incompleteness of search and inaccuracies in the heuristic. It is usually believed that deeper lookahead increases the chances of taking the optimal action. In this paper, we demonstrate that this is not necessarily the case, even when admissible and consistent heuristic functions are used.
2273900
Channel estimation and interference suppression for space-time coded systems in frequency-selective fading channels
Summary It is of great interest to provide high data rate services in wireless communication systems. In order to support such services, it is desirable to extend space-time (ST) coding, originally proposed for known, frequency-nonselective fading channels, to unknown, multipath channels. In this paper, we consider the problem of interference suppression for wireless TDMA (time division multiple access) systems equipped with multiple transmit antennas and receive antennas in frequency-selective fading channels. A novel scheme with space-time block coding based transmit diversity (STTD) is presented to estimate the multipath channel, coherently demodulate information symbols, and meanwhile suppress radio interference. The proposed scheme is simple to implement and able to mitigate interference of various origins, including intersymbol interference (ISI), cochannel interference (CCI), and others. Numerical examples are presented to illustrate the performance of the proposed estimator and detector in multipath Rayleigh-fading channels. Copyright  2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
2365659
A Trajectory-Preserving Synchronization Method for Collaborative Visualization
In the past decade, a lot of research work has been conducted to support collaborative visualization among remote users over the networks, allowing them to visualize and manipulate shared data for problem solving. There are many applications of collaborative visualization, such as oceanography, meteorology and medical science. To facilitate user interaction, a critical system requirement for collaborative visualization is to ensure that remote users would perceive a synchronized view of the shared data. Failing this requirement, the user's ability in performing the desirable collaborative tasks would be affected. In this paper, we propose a synchronization method to support collaborative visualization. It considers how interaction with dynamic objects is perceived by application participants under the existence of network latency, and remedies the motion trajectory of the dynamic objects. It also handles the false positive and false negative collision detection problems. The new method is particularly well designed for handling content changes due to unpredictable user interventions or object collisions. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method through a number of experiments
14311449
A software framework for matchmaking based on semantic web technology
An important objective of the Semantic Web is to make Electronic Commerce interactions more flexible and automated. To achieve this, standardization of ontologies, message content and message protocols will be necessary.In this paper we investigate how Semantic and Web Services technologies can be used to support service advertisement and discovery in e-commerce. In particular, we describe the design and implementation of a service matchmaking prototype which uses a DAML-S based ontology and a Description Logic reasoner to compare ontology based service descriptions. We also present the results of initial experiments testing the performance of this prototype implementation in a realistic agent based e-commerce scenario.
19381318
Fuzzy dynamic programming approach to hybrid multiobjective multistage decision-making problems
The purpose of this paper is to develop a new fuzzy dynamic programming approach for solving hybrid multiobjective multistage decision-making problems. We first present a methodology of fuzzy evaluation and fuzzy optimization for hybrid multiobjective systems, in which the qualitative and quantitative objectives are synthetically considered. The qualitative objectives are evaluated by decision-makers with linguistic variables and the quantitative objectives are converted into proper dimensionless indices. After getting the marginal evaluations for each objective, a new aggregation method based on the principle of fuzzy pattern recognition is developed to get a global evaluation for all objectives. With the global evaluation obtained, a fuzzy optimization process is performed. Then we present a dynamic optimization algorithm by incorporating the fuzzy optimization process with the conventional dynamic programming technique to solve hybrid multiobjective multistage decision-making problems. A characteristic feature of the approach proposed is that various objectives are synthetically considered by the fuzzy systematic technique instead of the frequently employed weighted average method. Finally, an illustrative example is also given to clarify the developed approach and to demonstrate its effectiveness.