16439747
Improving unstructured peer-to-peer systems by adaptive connection establishment
In unstructured peer-to-peer (P2P) systems, the mechanism of a peer randomly joining and leaving a P2P network causes a topology mismatch between the P2P logical overlay network and the physical underlying network, incurring a large volume of redundant traffic in the Internet. In order to alleviate the topology mismatch problem, we propose adaptive connection establishment (ACE), an algorithm for building an overlay multicast tree among each source node and the peers within a certain diameter from the source peer and further optimizing the neighbor connections that are not on the tree while retaining the search scope. Our simulation study shows that this approach can effectively solve the mismatch problem and significantly reduce P2P traffic. We further study the trade-offs between the topology optimization rate and the information exchange overhead by changing the diameter used to build the tree.
848425
Location awareness in unstructured peer-to-peer systems
Peer-to-peer (P2P) computing has emerged as a popular model aiming at further utilizing Internet information and resources. However, the mechanism of peers randomly choosing logical neighbors without any knowledge about underlying physical topology can cause a serious topology mismatch between the P2P overlay network and the physical underlying network. The topology mismatch problem brings great stress in the Internet infrastructure. It greatly limits the performance gain from various search or routing techniques. Meanwhile, due to the inefficient overlay topology, the flooding-based search mechanisms cause a large volume of unnecessary traffic. Aiming at alleviating the mismatching problem and reducing the unnecessary traffic, we propose a location-aware topology matching (LTM) technique. LTM builds an efficient overlay by disconnecting slow connections and choosing physically closer nodes as logical neighbors while still retaining the search scope and reducing response time for queries. LTM is scalable and completely distributed in the sense that it does not require any global knowledge of the whole overlay network. The effectiveness of LTM is demonstrated through simulation studies.
18230
Indexable PLA for Efficient Similarity Search
Similarity-based search over time-series databases has been a hot research topic for a long history, which is widely used in many applications, including multimedia retrieval, data mining, web search and retrieval, and so on. However, due to high dimensionality (i.e. length) of the time series, the similarity search over directly indexed time series usually encounters a serious problem, known as the "dimensionality curse". Thus, many dimensionality reduction techniques are proposed to break such curse by reducing the dimensionality of time series. Among all the proposed methods, only Piecewise Linear Approximation (PLA) does not have indexing mechanisms to support similarity queries, which prevents it from efficiently searching over very large time-series databases. Our initial studies on the effectiveness of different reduction methods, however, show that PLA performs no worse than others. Motivated by this, in this paper, we re-investigate PLA for approximating and indexing time series. Specifically, we propose a novel distance function in the reduced PLA-space, and prove that this function indeed results in a lower bound of the Euclidean distance between the original time series, which can lead to no false dismissals during the similarity search. As a second step, we develop an effective approach to index these lower bounds to improve the search efficiency. Our extensive experiments over a wide spectrum of real and synthetic data sets have demonstrated the efficiency and effectiveness of PLA together with the newly proposed lower bound distance, in terms of both pruning power and wall clock time, compared with two state-of-the-art reduction methods, Adaptive Piecewise Constant Approximation (APCA) and Chebyshev Polynomials (CP).
35965067
Dynamic Layer Management in Superpeer Architectures
Superpeer unstructured P2P systems have been found to be very effective by dividing the peers into two layers, superlayer and leaf-layer, in which message flooding is only conducted among superlayer and all leaf-peers are represented by corresponding superpeers. However, current superpeer systems do not employ any effective layer management schemes, so the transient and low-capacity peers are allowed to act as superpeers. Moreover, the lack of an appropriate size ratio maintenance mechanism on superlayer to leaf-layer makes the system's search performance far from being optimal. We present one workload model aimed at reducing the weighted overhead of a network. Using our proposed workload model, a network can determine an optimal layer size ratio between leaf-layer and superlayer. We then propose a dynamic layer management algorithm, DLM, which can maintain an optimal layer size ratio and adaptively elect and adjust peers between superlayer and leaf-layer. DLM is completely distributed in the sense that each peer decides to be a superpeer or a leaf-peer independently without global knowledge. DLM could effectively help a superpeer P2P system maintain the optimal layer size ratio and designate peers with relatively long lifetime and large capacities as superpeers, and the peers with short lifetime and low capacities as leaf-peers under highly dynamic network situations. We demonstrate that the quality of a superpeer system is significantly improved under the DLM scheme by comprehensive simulations.
6911930
LANDMARC: Indoor Location Sensing Using Active RFID
Growing convergence among mobile computing devices and embedded technology sparks the development and deployment of “context-aware” applications, where location is the most essential context. In this paper we present LANDMARC, a location sensing prototype system that uses Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology for locating objects inside buildings. The major advantage of LANDMARC is that it improves the overall accuracy of locating objects by utilizing the concept of reference tags. Based on experimental analysis, we demonstrate that active RFID is a viable and cost-effective candidate for indoor location sensing. Although RFID is not designed for indoor location sensing, we point out three major features that should be added to make RFID technologies competitive in this new and growing market.
12060317
DiCAS: An Efficient Distributed Caching Mechanism for P2P Systems
Peer-to-peer networks are widely criticized for their inefficient flooding search mechanism. Distributed hash table (DHT) algorithms have been proposed to improve the search efficiency by mapping the index of a file to a unique peer based on predefined hash functions. However, the tight coupling between indices and hosting peers incurs high maintenance cost in a highly dynamic network. To properly balance the tradeoff between the costs of indexing and searching, we propose the distributed caching and adaptive search (DiCAS) algorithm, where indices are passively cached in a group of peers based on a predefined hash function. Guided by the same function, adaptive search selectively forwards queries to "matched" peers with a high probability of caching the desired indices. The search cost is reduced due to shrunk searching space. Different from the DHT solutions, distributed caching loosely maps the index of a file to a group of peers in a passive fashion, which saves the cost of updating indices. Our simulation study shows that the DiCAS protocol can significantly reduce the network search traffic with the help of small cache space contributed by each individual peer
8733679
Stochastic Fluid Theory for P2P Streaming Systems
We develop a simple stochastic fluid model that seeks to expose the fundamental characteristics and limitations of P2P streaming systems. This model accounts for many of the essential features of a P2P streaming system, including the peers' realtime demand for content, peer churn (peers joining and leaving), peers with heterogeneous upload capacity, limited infrastructure capacity, and peer buffering and playback delay. The model is tractable, providing closed-form expressions which can be used to shed insight on the fundamental behavior of P2P streaming systems. The model shows that performance is largely determined by a critical value. When the system is of moderate-to-large size, if a certain ratio of traffic loads exceeds the critical value, the system performs well; otherwise, the system performs poorly. Furthermore, large systems have better performance than small systems since they are more resilient to bandwidth fluctuations caused by peer churn. Finally, buffering can dramatically improve performance in the critical region, for both small and large systems. In particular, buffering can bring more improvement than can additional infrastructure bandwidth.
5050501
Eliminating dead code on recursive data
This paper describes a powerful method for dead-code analysis and elimination in the presence of recursive data constructions. We describe partially dead recursive data using liveness patterns based on general regular tree grammars extended with the notion of live and dead, and we formulate the analysis as computing liveness patterns at all program points based on constraints constructed from the program and programming language semantics. The analysis yields the most precise program-based grammars that satisfy the constraints. The analysis algorithm takes cubic time in terms of the size of the program in the worst case but is very efficient in practice, as shown by our prototype implementation. The analysis results are used to identify and eliminate dead code. The framework for representing and analyzing properties of recursive data structures using general regular tree grammars applies to other analyses as well.
14752852
A toolkit for automatically constructing outdoor radio maps
Outdoor location systems based on wireless access point (WAP) signal strength must either know the exact location of the WAPs in order to use a triangulation algorithm, or must construct a radio-map of the signal strengths. While the radio-map technique increases accuracy and can accommodate a wireless network that is not owned by any one entity, conventional methods for constructing a radio-map are labor-intensive and impractical in such environments. We introduce a toolkit for automatically constructing outdoor radio-maps. Our toolkit can easily be carried by delivery personnel and security guards during their normal work duties to obtain signal readings. The scattered data readings are then fed into an interpolation algorithm to construct a more complete grid that can be used as the radio-map.
903407
On integrating fluid models with packet simulation
Fluid models have been shown to he efficient and accurate in modelling large IP networks. However, unlike packet models, it is difficult to extract packet-level information from them. In this paper, we present a hybrid simulation method that maintains the performance advantage of fluid models while providing detailed packet level information for selected packet traffic flows. We propose two models to account for the interaction between background TCP traffic in a fluid network and foreground packet traffic of interest. The first assumes that the packet traffic poses a negligible load on the fluid network whereas the second accounts for the added load by transforming the packet traffic into fluid flows and solving the resulting enhanced fluid model. The first of these yields an efficient one pass solution algorithm whereas the second requires an additional pass to account for the packet traffic load. We establish the correctness of both approaches and present their implementation within ns-2. Comparisons between the hybrid models and a classical packet simulation show the two pass approach to be quite accurate and computationally efficient.
15516376
Supervised rank aggregation
This paper is concerned with rank aggregation, the task of combining the ranking results of individual rankers at meta-search. Previously, rank aggregation was performed mainly by means of unsupervised learning. To further enhance ranking accuracies, we propose employing supervised learning to perform the task, using labeled data. We refer to the approach as Supervised Rank Aggregation. We set up a general framework for conducting Supervised Rank Aggregation, in which learning is formalized an optimization which minimizes disagreements between ranking results and the labeled data. As case study, we focus on Markov Chain based rank aggregation in this paper. The optimization for Markov Chain based methods is not a convex optimization problem, however, and thus is hard to solve. We prove that we can transform the optimization problem into that of Semidefinite Programming and solve it efficiently. Experimental results on meta-searches show that Supervised Rank Aggregation can significantly outperform existing unsupervised methods.