Aadhaar is the world’s largest biometric database with a billion records, being compiled as an identity platform to deliver social services to residents of India. Aadhaar processes streams of biometric data as residents are enrolled and updated. Besides ( )1 million enrollments and updates per day, up to 100 million daily biometric authentications are expected during delivery of various public services. These form critical Big Data applications, with large volumes and high velocity of data. Here, we propose a stream processing workload, based on the Aadhaar enrollment and Authentication applications, as a Big Data benchmark for distributed stream processing systems. We describe the application composition, and characterize their task latencies and selectivity, and data rate and size distributions, based on real observations. We also validate this benchmark on Apache Storm using synthetic streams and simulated application logic. This paper offers a unique glimpse into an operational national identity infrastructure, and proposes a benchmark for “fast data” platforms to support such eGovernance applications.
The @cite_7 simulates a highway toll system for motor vehicles with variable tolling, and was meant to compare Data Stream Management Systems (DSMS) with Database Management Systems (DBMS). The input to the benchmark is from a traffic model that has variable number of vehicles, but each emitting tuples at a uniform rate and with the same type. So while the input rate is variable, each message is of a fixed, small size. The metrics for evaluation are the response time and accuracy of the query, and the maximum sustained rate within a specified response time, but it does not consider resource utilization. While not developed for distributed stream processing systems, which deal with opaque messages and user logic, it can be adopted to validate DSPS. Our proposed benchmark is particularly tuned for DSPS and simulates the behavior of a real-world eGovernance workload, with variable message sizes and resource efficiency as an additional metric.
@cite_7
2112215401 2136340918 2123733911 2038609352 2070708339 2071515504 2057661320 2125890412 2094331586 1975618234 2044301459 1510598052 2038940887 2151771412 2110505033 2905059695 1974835443 2168965212 2127388041 2329068866
This paper specifies the Linear Road Benchmark for Stream Data Management Systems (SDMS). Stream Data Management Systems process streaming data by executing continuous and historical queries while producing query results in real-time. This benchmark makes it possible to compare the performance characteristics of SDMS' relative to each other and to alternative (e.g., Relational Database) systems. Linear Road has been endorsed as an SDMS benchmark by the developers of both the Aurora [1] (out of Brandeis University, Brown University and MIT) and STREAM [8] (out of Stanford University) stream systems. Linear Road simulates a toll system for the motor vehicle expressways of a large metropolitan area. The tolling system uses "variable tolling" [6, 11, 9]: an increasingly prevalent tolling technique that uses such dynamic factors as traffic congestion and accident proximity to calculate toll charges. Linear Road specifies a variable tolling system for a fictional urban area including such features as accident detection and alerts, traffic congestion measurements, toll calculations and historical queries. After specifying the benchmark, we describe experimental results involving two implementations: one using a commercially available Relational Database and the other using Aurora. Our results show that a dedicated Stream Data Management System can outperform a Relational Database by at least a factor of 5 on streaming data applications. We consider the problem of resource allocation in downlink OFDMA systems for multi service and unknown environment. Due to users' mobility and intercell interference, the base station cannot predict neither the Signal to Noise Ratio (SNR) of each user in future time slots nor their probability distribution functions. In addition, the traffic is bursty in general with unknown arrival. The probability distribution functions of the SNR, channel state and traffic arrival density are then unknown. Achieving a multi service Quality of Service (QoS) while optimizing the performance of the system (e.g. total throughput) is a hard and interesting task since it depends on the unknown future traffic and SNR values. In this paper we solve this problem by modeling the multiuser queuing system as a discrete time linear dynamic system. We develop a robust H∞ controller to regulate the queues of different users. The queues and Packet Drop Rates (PDR) are controlled by proposing a minimum data rate according to the demanded service type of each user. The data rate vector proposed by the controller is then fed as a constraint to an instantaneous resource allocation framework. This instantaneous problem is formulated as a convex optimization problem for instantaneous subcarrier and power allocation decisions. Simulation results show small delays and better fairness among users. We prove the existence of tolls to induce multicommodity, heterogeneous network users that independently choose routes minimizing their own linear function of tolls versus latency to collectively form the traffic pattern of a minimum average latency flow. This generalizes both the previous known results of the existence of tolls for multicommodity, homogeneous users (, 1956) and for single commodity, heterogeneous users (, 2003). Unlike previous proofs for single commodity users in general graphs, our proof is constructive - it does not rely on a fixed point theorem - and results in a simple polynomial-sized linear program to compute tolls when the number of different types of users is bounded by a polynomial. We show that our proof gives a complete characterization of flows that are enforceable by tolls. In particular, tolls exist to induce any traffic pattern that is the result of minimizing an arbitrary function from R sup E(G) to the reals that is nondecreasing in each of its arguments. Thus, tolls exist to induce flows with minimum average weighted latency, minimum maximum latency, and other natural objectives. We give an exponential bound on tolls that is independent of the number of network users and the number of commodities. We use this to show that multicommodity tolls also exist when users are not from discrete classes, but instead define a general function that trades off latency versus toll preference. Finally, we show that our result extends to very general frameworks. In particular, we show that tolls exist to induce the Nash equilibrium of general nonatomic congestion games to be system optimal. In particular, tolls exist even when 1) latencies depend on user type; 2) latency functions are nonseparable functions of traffic on edges; 3) the latency of a set S is an arbitrary function of the latencies of the resources contained in S. Our exponential bound on size of tolls also holds in this case; and we give an example of a congestion game that shows this is tight; it requires tolls that are exponential in the size of the game. Cooperative vehicle safety (CVS) systems operate based on broadcast of vehicle position and safety information to neighboring cars. The communication medium of CVS is a vehicular ad-hoc network. One of the main challenges in large scale deployment of CVS systems is the issue of scalability. To address the scalability problem, several congestion control methods have been proposed and are currently under field study. These algorithms adapt transmission rate and power based on network measures such as channel busy ratio. We examine two such algorithms and study their dynamic behavior in time and space to evaluate stability (in time) and fairness (in space) properties of these algorithms. We present stability conditions and evaluate stability and fairness of the algorithms through simulation experiments. Results show that there is a trade-off between fast convergence, temporal stability and spatial fairness. The proper ranges of parameters for achieving stability are presented for the discussed algorithms. Stability is verified for all typical highway density cases for static traffic as well as real scenarios. Fairness is shown to be naturally achieved for some algorithms and its analysis is under study in another work of us. Under the same conditions other algorithms may have problem to maintain fairness in space. We have shown that this can be resolved by a distributed measurement of CBR and is verified. In order to support driver assistance systems in unconstrained environments, we propose to extend local appearance-based road classification with a spatial feature generation and classification. Therefore, a hierarchical approach consisting of multiple low level base classifiers, the novel spatial feature generation, as well as a final road terrain classification, is used. The system perceives a variety of local properties of the environment by means of base classifiers operating on patches extracted from monocular camera images, each represented in a metric confidence map. The core of the proposed approach is the computation of spatial ray features (SPRAY) from these confidence maps. With this, the road-terrain classifier can decide based on local visual properties and their spatial layout in the scene. In order to show the feasibility of the approach, the extraction and evaluation of the metric ego-lane driving corridor on an inner city stream is demonstrated. This is a challenging task because on a local appearance level, ego-lane is not distinguishable from other asphalt parts on the road. However, by incorporating the proposed SPRAY features the distinction is possible without requiring an explicit lane model. Due to the parallel structure of this bottom-up approach, the implemented system operates in real-time with approximately 25 Hz on a GPU. Channel congestion is one of the major challenges for deployment of collision avoidance systems based on DSRC (Dedicated Short Range Communication) in large scale networks. If vehicles do not adapt to congestion conditions, DSRC transmissions could encounter extensive packet losses in areas of high vehicle density, leading to degradation in the performance of safety applications. In this paper, we propose a novel congestion control algorithm called Error Model Based Adaptive Rate Control (EMBARC) which adapts a vehicle's transmission rate as a function of channel load and vehicular dynamics. In particular, we extend Linear Integrated Message Rate Control (LIMERIC) algorithm's message rate adaptation with the capability to preemptively schedule messages based on the vehicle's movement. This leads to more transmission opportunities for vehicles with higher dynamics. The determination of a preemptive scheduling event is based on a novel suspected tracking error technique. Since LIMERIC maintains the channel load around a specific value, vehicles moving less dynamically will adapt to slightly reduced transmission rates in EMBARC. The extra transmit opportunities for highly dynamic vehicles reduce incidences of large tracking error compared to a pure LIMERIC approach. At the same time, EMBARC's use of adaptive rate control provides tracking error advantages over systems that transmit largely independent of channel load. We use simulations of a road with a winding segment to compare EMBARC with algorithms that do not take both channel load and vehicle dynamics into account. The results show that EMBARC has the best tracking accuracy among these algorithms over a wide range of node densities. Vehicular communications are becoming an emerging technology for safety control, traffic control, urban monitoring, pollution control, and many other road safety and traffic efficiency applications. All these applications generate a lot of data which should be distributed among communication parties such as vehicles and users in an efficient manner. On the other hand, the generated data cause a significant load on a network infrastructure, which aims at providing uninterrupted services to the communication parties in an urban scenario. To make a balance of load on the network for such situations in the urban scenario, frequently accessed contents should be cached at specified locations either in the vehicles or at some other sites on the infrastructure providing connectivity to the vehicles. However, due to the high mobility and sparse distribution of the vehicles on the road, sometimes, it is not feasible to place the contents on the existing infrastructure, and useful information generated from the vehicles may not be sent to its final destination. To address this issue, in this paper, we propose a new peer-to-peer (P2P) cooperative caching scheme. To minimize the load on the infrastructure, traffic information among vehicles is shared in a P2P manner using a Markov chain model with three states. The replacement of existing data to accommodate newly arrived data is achieved in a probabilistic manner. The probability is calculated using the time to stay in a waiting state and the frequency of access of a particular data item in a given time interval. The performance of the proposed scheme is evaluated in comparison to those of existing schemes with respect to the metrics such as network congestion, query delay, and hit ratio. Analysis results show that the proposed scheme has reduced the congestion and query delay by 30 with an increase in the hit ratio by 20 . This paper first provides a brief survey on existing traffic offloading techniques in wireless networks. Particularly as a case study, we put forward an online reinforcement learning framework for the problem of traffic offloading in a stochastic heterogeneous cellular network (HCN), where the time-varying traffic in the network can be offloaded to nearby small cells. Our aim is to minimize the total discounted energy consumption of the HCN while maintaining the quality-of-service (QoS) experienced by mobile users. For each cell (i.e., a macro cell or a small cell), the energy consumption is determined by its system load, which is coupled with system loads in other cells due to the sharing over a common frequency band. We model the energy-aware traffic offloading problem in such HCNs as a discrete-time Markov decision process (DTMDP). Based on the traffic observations and the traffic offloading operations, the network controller gradually optimizes the traffic offloading strategy with no prior knowledge of the DTMDP statistics. Such a model-free learning framework is important, particularly when the state space is huge. In order to solve the curse of dimensionality, we design a centralized @math -learning with compact state representation algorithm, which is named @math -learning. Moreover, a decentralized version of the @math -learning is developed based on the fact the macro base stations (BSs) can independently manage the operations of local small-cell BSs through making use of the global network state information obtained from the network controller. Simulations are conducted to show the effectiveness of the derived centralized and decentralized @math -learning algorithms in balancing the tradeoff between energy saving and QoS satisfaction. Understanding and solving performance-related issues of current and future (5G+) networks requires the availability of realistic, yet simple and manageable, traffic models which capture and regenerate various properties of real traffic with sufficient accuracy and minimum number of parameters. Traffic in wireless cellular networks must be modeled in the space domain as well as the time domain. Modeling traffic in the time domain has been investigated well. However, for modeling the User Equipment (UE) distribution in the space domain, either the unrealistic uniform Poisson model, or some non-adjustable model, or specifc data from operators, is commonly used. In this paper, stochastic geometry is used to explain the similarities of traffic modeling in the time domain and the space domain. It is shown that traffic modeling in the time domain is a special one-dimensional case of traffic modeling in the space domain. Unified and non-parameterized metrics for characterizing the heterogeneity of traffic in the time domain and the space domain are proposed and their equivalence to the inter-arrival time, a well accepted metric in the time domain, is demonstrated. Coefficient of Variation (CoV), the normalized second-order statistic, is suggested as an appropriate statistical property of traffic to be measured. Simulation results show that the proposed metrics capture the properties of traffic more accurately than the existing metrics. Finally, the performance of LTE networks under modeled traffic using the new metrics is illustrated. We investigate a wireless system of multiple cells, each having a downlink shared channel in support of high-speed packet data services. In practice, such a system consists of hierarchically organized entities including a central server, Base Stations (BSs), and Mobile Stations (MSs). Our goal is to improve global resource utilization and reduce regional congestion given asymmetric arrivals and departures of mobile users, a goal requiring load balancing among multiple cells. For this purpose, we propose a scalable cross-layer framework to coordinate packet-level scheduling, call-level cell-site selection and handoff, and system-level cell coverage based on load, throughput, and channel measurements. In this framework, an opportunistic scheduling algorithm--the weighted Alpha-Rule--exploits the gain of multiuser diversity in each cell independently, trading aggregate (mean) down-link throughput for fairness and minimum rate guarantees among MSs. Each MS adapts to its channel dynamics and the load fluctuations in neighboring cells, in accordance with MSs' mobility or their arrival and departure, by initiating load-aware handoff and cell-site selection. The central server adjusts schedulers of all cells to coordinate their coverage by prompting cell breathing or distributed MS handoffs. Across the whole system, BSs and MSs constantly monitor their load, throughput, or channel quality in order to facilitate the overall system coordination. Our specific contributions in such a framework are highlighted by the minimum-rate guaranteed weighted Alpha-Rule scheduling, the load-aware MS handoff cell-site selection, and the Media Access Control (MAC)-layer cell breathing. Our evaluations show that the proposed framework can improve global resource utilization and load balancing, resulting in a smaller blocking rate of MS arrivals without extra resources while the aggregate throughput remains roughly the same or improved at the hot-spots. Our simulation tests also show that the coordinated system is robust to dynamic load fluctuations and is scalable to both the system dimension and the size of MS population. In this paper we study the resource allocation problem for the multiuser orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM)-based cognitive radio (CR) systems with proportional rate constraints. The mutual interference introduced by primary user (PU) and cognitive radio user (also referred to secondary user, SU) makes the optimization problem of CR systems more complex. Moreover, the interference introduced to PUs must be kept under a given threshold. In this paper, the highest achievable rate of each OFDM subchannel is calculated by jointly considering the channel gain and interference level. First, a subchannel is assigned to the SU with the highest achievable rate. The remaining subchannels are always allocated to the SU that suffers the severest unjustness. Second, an efficient bit allocation algorithm is developed to maximize the sum capacity, which is again based on the highest achievable rate of each subchannel. Finally, an adjustment procedure is designed to maintain proportional fairness. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm maximizes the sum capacity while keeping the proportional rate constraints satisfied. The algorithm exhibits a good tradeoff between sum capacity maximization and proportional fairness. Furthermore, the proposed algorithm has lower complexity compared with other algorithms, rendering it promising for practical applications. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. (By jointly considering the channel gain and the interference level of the OFDM-based cognitive radio systems, the highest achievable rate of each subchannel can be calculated, which indicates the ability of carrying bits of the subchannel. Using the normalized cost index list, an efficient algorithm is proposed to maximize the sum capacity of the cognitive OFDM systems while keeping the proportional rate constraints satisfied.) We study a processing system comprised of parallel queues, whose individual service rates are specified by a global service mode (configuration). The issue is how to switch the system between various possible service modes, so as to maximize its throughput and maintain stability under the most workload-intensive input traffic traces (arrival processes). Stability preserves the job inflow–outflow balance at each queue on the traffic traces. Two key families of service policies are shown to maximize throughput, under the mild condition that traffic traces have long-term average workload rates. In the first family of cone policies, the service mode is chosen based on the system backlog state belonging to a corresponding cone. Two distinct policy classes of that nature are investigated, MaxProduct and FastEmpty. In the second family of batch policies (BatchAdapt), jobs are collectively scheduled over adaptively chosen horizons, according to an asymptotically optimal, robust schedule. The issues of nonpreemptive job processing and non-negligible switching times between service modes are addressed. The analysis is extended to cover feed-forward networks of such processing systems nodes. The approach taken unifies and generalizes prior studies, by developing a general trace-based modeling framework (sample-path approach) for addressing the queueing stability problem. It treats the queueing structure as a deterministic dynamical system and analyzes directly its evolution trajectories. It does not require any probabilistic superstructure, which is typically used in previous approaches. Probability can be superposed later to address finer performance questions (e.g., delay). The throughput maximization problem is seen to be primarily of structural nature. The developed methodology appears to have broader applicability to other queueing systems. Wireless vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) and vehicle-toinfrastructure (V2I) communication holds great promise for significantly reducing the human and financial costs of vehicle collisions. A common characteristic of this communication is the broadcast of a device's core state information at regular intervals (e.g., vehicle speed and location or traffic signal state and timing). Unless controlled, the aggregate of these broadcasts will congest the channel under dense traffic scenarios, reducing the effectiveness of collision avoidance applications that use transmitted information. Active congestion control using distributed techniques is a topic of great interest for establishing the scalability of this technology. This paper defines a new adaptive congestion control algorithm that can be applied to the message rate of devices in this vehicular environment. While other published approaches rely on binary control, the LInear MEssage Rate Integrated Control (LIMERIC) algorithm takes advantage of full-precision control inputs that are available on the wireless channel. The result is provable convergence to fair and efficient channel utilization in the deterministic environment, under simple criteria for setting adaptive parameters. This “perfect” convergence avoids the limit cycle behavior that is inherent to binary control. We also discuss several practical aspects associated with implementing LIMERIC, including guidelines for the choice of system parameters to obtain desired utilization outcomes, a gain saturation technique that maintains robust convergence under all conditions, convergence with asynchronous updates, and using channel load to determine the aggregate message rate that is observable at a receiver. This paper also extends the convergence analysis for two important cases, i.e., measurement noise in the input signal and delay in the update process. This paper illustrates key analytical results using MATLAB numerical results and employs standard NS-2 simulations to demonstrate the performance of LIMERIC in several high-density scenarios. Machine-to-machine (M2M) communications have many applications, such as in smart grid, health monitoring alerting, and intelligent transportation. Due to unique characteristics that are different from the traditional human-to-human communications, numerous design challenges have to be tackled in M2M. A critical issue is that of dealing with the massive access of machine-type communication (MTC) devices while guaranteeing the desired quality of service (QoS). In this paper, we group MTC devices into clusters based on their QoS requirement. By utilizing the time-controlled M2M feature, we formulate the problem of massive access with QoS guarantee as a queuing problem. We derive an overflow probability estimation model by applying a large deviation principle and then propose an online-measurement-based adaptive massive access management for deciding the amount of resources allocated for each cluster. The proposed method bases the decision on the observed traffic workload with no prior knowledge of its statistics. We conduct the simulations in multicluster scenarios with distinct maximum tolerable delay and corresponding acceptable probability in a long-term evolution system. The simulation results show the adaptability of the proposed massive access management regime to the variations in the traffic workload; thus, it is capable of accommodating dynamic propagation conditions and unknown traffic characteristics, particularly in burst-by-burst communications. Direct radio-based vehicle-to-vehicle communication can help prevent accidents by providing accurate and up-to-date local status and hazard information to the driver. In this paper, we assume that two types of messages are used for traffic safety-related communication: 1) Periodic messages (ldquobeaconsrdquo) that are sent by all vehicles to inform their neighbors about their current status (i.e., position) and 2) event-driven messages that are sent whenever a hazard has been detected. In IEEE 802.11 distributed-coordination-function-based vehicular networks, interferences and packet collisions can lead to the failure of the reception of safety-critical information, in particular when the beaconing load leads to an almost-saturated channel, as it could easily happen in many critical vehicular traffic conditions. In this paper, we demonstrate the importance of transmit power control to avoid saturated channel conditions and ensure the best use of the channel for safety-related purposes. We propose a distributed transmit power control method based on a strict fairness criterion, i.e., distributed fair power adjustment for vehicular environments (D-FPAV), to control the load of periodic messages on the channel. The benefits are twofold: 1) The bandwidth is made available for higher priority data like dissemination of warnings, and 2) beacons from different vehicles are treated with ldquoequal rights,rdquo and therefore, the best possible reception under the available bandwidth constraints is ensured. We formally prove the fairness of the proposed approach. Then, we make use of the ns-2 simulator that was significantly enhanced by realistic highway mobility patterns, improved radio propagation, receiver models, and the IEEE 802.11p specifications to show the beneficial impact of D-FPAV for safety-related communications. We finally put forward a method, i.e., emergency message dissemination for vehicular environments (EMDV), for fast and effective multihop information dissemination of event-driven messages and show that EMDV benefits of the beaconing load control provided by D-FPAV with respect to both probability of reception and latency. The safety validation of automated driving of SAE level 3 and higher (AD) is still an unsolved issue. In the validation process, criticality metrics can be used for two different purposes. First, for the identification of test scenarios from recorded data that are later tested in simulation. Secondly, for an estimation of the safety of a specific AD system based on the likelihood of critical situations in test drives or in other words as a safety surrogate. In the past, different metrics for those purposes have been defined that work well in specific scenarios such as longitudinal traffic. However, a metric that describes criticality in all situations and is applicable to human and AD traffic is currently not available. In this paper, an approach to define a criticality metric is introduced. The metric is based on the definition of criticality as the level of driving requirements in the specific situation. The computation of the proposed metric uses elements of model predictive control using an objective function that contains four elements that describe the difficulty of the driving task. Based on those demands and a simplified driving dynamics model, the solution with the minimal criticality is computed. Finally, the metric is tested in four test scenarios that are typical for highway traffic. A short parameter variation study is conducted in order to study certain effects of the algorithm and to identify room for improvement. This paper derives a simple fast algorithm for computing minimal-revenue tolls in a single-origin network. It assumes that trips have the same value of time, that they make user-optimizing path choices, and they have multiple destinations--but come from the same origin. The algorithm finds tolls that induce a traffic pattern minimizing average time per trip at a minimal average toll per trip. Formally, let X be the set of all feasible traffic assignments and assume all trips have the same value of time [alpha]>0; then the algorithm inputs a network with the system-optimizing flow xo vector and associated arc times t(xo). It outputs an optimal arc toll vector c*[greater-or-equal, slanted]0 such that for x[set membership, variant]X:([alpha]t(xo)+c*)T(x-xo)[greater-or-equal, slanted]0 Â forÂ x[set membership, variant]X (user Â optimal) That is, xo[set membership, variant]X becomes user-optimal, too. Compared to marginal-cost tolls, which would also produce this same effect, the min-revenue tolls c* possess important practical advantages. Perforce, they provide the same system-optimal network usage, but at a much cheaper price to the traveler--remarkably, they assure at least one toll-free path to every destination. In addition, min-revenue tolls have admirable stability: even large increases in travel demand can leave the solution c* virtually unchanged--an important feature since traffic volume can change continuously but tolls cannot. Finally, they provide guidance regarding potential network improvements. The algorithm presented is very efficient, easily able to solve networks with tens of thousands of nodes. A greedy potentials calculator, its expected running time for an n-node road network is a speedy O(n), while its worst case time for any network is O(m), where m is the number of arcs. We consider a multiclass multiplexer with support for multiple service classes and dedicated buffers for each service class. Under specific scheduling policies for sharing bandwidth among these classes, we seek the asymptotic (as the buffer size goes to infinity) tail of the buffer overflow probability for each dedicated buffer. We assume dependent arrival and service processes as is usually the case in models of bursty traffic. In the standard large deviations methodology, we provide a lower and a matching (up to first degree in the exponent) upper bound on the buffer overflow probabilities. We introduce a novel optimal control approach to address these problems. In particular, we relate the lower bound derivation to a deterministic optimal control problem, which we explicitly solve. Optimal state trajectories of the control problem correspond to typical congestion scenarios. We explicitly and in detail characterize the most likely modes of overflow. We specialize our results to the generalized processor sharing policy (GPS) and the generalized longest queue first policy (GLQF). The performance of strict priority policies is obtained as a corollary. We compare the GPS and GLQF policies and conclude that GLQF achieves smaller overflow probabilities than GPS for all arrival and service processes for which our analysis holds. Our results have important implications for traffic management of high-speed networks and can be used as a basis for an admission control mechanism which guarantees a different loss probability for each class. Traffic grooming is the term used to describe how different traffic streams are packed into higher speed streams. In a synchronous optical network-wavelength division multiplexing (SONET-WDM) ring network, each wavelength can carry several lower-rate traffic streams in time division (TDM) fashion. The traffic demand, which is an integer multiple of the timeslot capacity, between any two nodes is established on several TDM virtual connections. A virtual connection needs to be added and dropped only at the two end nodes of the connection; as a result, the electronic add-drop multiplexers (ADMs) at intermediate nodes (if there are any) will electronically bypass this timeslot. Instead of having an ADM on every wavelength at every node, it may be possible to have some nodes on some wavelength where no add-drop is needed on any timeslot; thus, the total number of ADMs in the network (and, hence, the network cost) can be reduced. Under the static traffic pattern, the savings can be maximized by carefully packing the virtual connections into wavelengths. In this work, we allow arbitrary (nonuniform) traffic and we present a formal mathematical definition of the problem, which turns out to be an integer linear program (ILP). Then, we propose a simulated-annealing-based heuristic algorithm for the case where all the traffic is carried on directly connected virtual connections (referred to as the single-hop case). Next, we study the case where a hub node is used to bridge traffic from different wavelengths (referred to as the multihop case). We find the following main results. The simulated-annealing-based approach has been found to achieve the best results, so far, in most cases, relative to other comparable approaches proposed in the literature. In general, a multihop approach can achieve better equipment savings when the traffic-grooming ratio is large, but it consumes more bandwidth. This paper presents a study of using deep bidirectional long short-term memory (DBLSTM) recurrent neural network as acoustic model for DBLSTM-HMM based large vocabulary continuous speech recognition (LVCSR), where a context-sensitive-chunk (CSC) back-propagation through time (BPTT) approach is used to train DBLSTM by splitting each training sequence into chunks with appended contextual observations, and a CSC-based decoding method with possibly overlapped CSCs is used for recognition. Our approach makes mini-batch based training on GPU more efficient and reduces the latency of DBLSTM-based LVCSR from a whole utterance to a short chunk. Evaluations have been made on Switchboard-I benchmark task. In comparison with epoch-wise BPTT training, our method can achieve more than three times speedup on a single GPU card without degrading recognition accuracy. In comparison with a highly optimized DNN-HMM system trained by a frame-level cross entropy (CE) criterion, our CE-trained DBLSTM-HMM system achieves relative word error rate reductions of 9 and 5 on Eval2000 and RT03S testing sets, respectively. Furthermore, by running model averaging based parallel training of DBLSTM on a cluster of GPUs, CSC-BPTT incurs less accuracy degradation than epoch-wise BPTT while achieves a linear speedup.