IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems

Call admission control (CAC) plays a significant role in providing the desired quality of service (QoS) in cellular networks. We investigate the role of pricing as an additional dimension of the call admission control process in order to efficiently and effectively control the use of wireless network resources. First, we prove that, for a given wireless network, there exists a new call arrival rate which can maximize the total utility of users while maintaining the required QoS. Based on this result and observation, we propose an integrated pricing and call admission control scheme where the price is adjusted dynamically based on the current network conditions in order to alleviate the problem of congestion. Our proposed integrated approach implicitly implements a distributed user-based prioritization mechanism by providing negative incentives according to the current network conditions and therefore shaping the aggregate traffic in the network. We compare the performance of our approach in terms of congestion prevention, achievable total user utility, and obtained revenue, with the corresponding results of conventional systems where pricing is not taken into consideration in the call admission control process. These performance results verify the considerable improvement that can be achieved by the integration of pricing in the call admission control process in cellular networks.

We extend dominating-set-based routing to networks with unidirectional links. Specifically, an efficient localized algorithm for determining a dominating and absorbant set of vertices (mobile hosts) is given and this set can be easily updated when the network topology changes dynamically. A host /spl nu/ is called a dominating neighbor (absorbant neighbor) of another host u if there is a directed edge from /spl nu/ to u (from u to /spl nu/). A subset of vertices is dominating and absorbant if every vertex not in the subset has one dominating neighbor and one absorbant neighbor in the subset. The derived dominating and absorbant set exhibits good locality properties; that is, the change of a node status (dominating/dominated) affects only the status of nodes in the neighborhood. The notion of dominating and absorbant set can also be applied iteratively on the dominating and absorbant set itself, forming a hierarchy of dominating and absorbant sets. The effectiveness of our approach is confirmed and the locality of node status update is verified through simulation.

Recent advances in mobile computing and distributed multimedia systems allow mobile hosts (clients) to access wireless multimedia systems anywhere and at anytime, but not without creating a new set of issues and trade-offs. To the best of our knowledge, there has been very little research in dealing with the synchronization problem in wireless and mobile multimedia systems. In this paper, we propose an efficient distributed synchronization algorithm using quasi-sink for wireless and mobile multimedia systems to ensure and facilitate mobile client access to multimedia objects. We discuss the algorithm and provide its proof of correctness. We also present a set of simulation experiments to evaluate the performance of our scheme using message complexity and buffer usage at each frame arrival time. Our results indicate that our scheme exhibits a significant low message complexity and no underflow and overflow within the bounded delivery time.

How to keep the probability of hand-off drops within a prespecified limit is a very important quality-of-service (QoS) issue in cellular networks because mobile users should be able to maintain ongoing sessions even during their hand-off from one cell to another. We design and evaluate predictive and adaptive schemes for bandwidth reservation for the hand-offs of ongoing sessions and the admission control of new connections. We first develop a method to estimate user mobility based on an aggregate history of hand-offs observed in each cell. This method is then used to probabilistically predict mobiles' directions and hand-off times in a cell. For each cell, the bandwidth to be reserved for hand-offs is calculated by estimating the total sum of tractional bandwidths of the expected hand-offs within a mobility-estimation time window. Three different admission-control schemes for new connection requests using this bandwidth reservation are proposed. We also consider variations that utilize the path/location information available from the car navigation system or global positioning system. Finally, we evaluate the performance of the proposed schemes extensively to show that they meet our design goal and outperform the static reservation scheme under various scenarios.

Finding the position of a mobile agent in a wide distributed system still represents an open research issue. The paper proposes a naming scheme and a location protocol of general validity for mobile agents able to effectively meet all the typical requirements of mobile agent environments and, thus, easy to integrate into different platforms. The paper identifies the main characteristics which an agent naming scheme and a location protocol of general validity should have, and suggests some properties and parameters to be taken into account to evaluate the effectiveness of naming schemes and location protocols. Then, we propose a "human readable" agent naming scheme based on the distributed environment outlined in MASIF, and a suitable location finding protocol called the Search-By-Path-Chase. Both of them are compared with some of the solutions already provided, using the properties and the parameters suggested. The performances are finally evaluated by means of a set of measurements.

Nodes in a hexagonal network are placed at the vertices of a regular triangular tessellation, so that each node has up to six neighbors. The network is proposed as an alternative interconnection network to a mesh connected computer (with nodes serving as processors) and is used also to model cellular networks where nodes are the base stations. In this paper, we propose a suitable addressing scheme for nodes (with two variants), derive a formula for distance between nodes, and present a very simple and elegant routing algorithm. This addressing scheme and corresponding routing algorithm for hexagonal interconnection are considerably simpler than previously proposed solutions. We then apply the addressing scheme for solving two problems in cellular networks. With the new scheme, the distance between the new and old cell to which a mobile phone user is connected can be easily determined and coded with three integers, one of them being zero. Further, in order to minimize the wireless cost of tracking mobile users, we propose hexagonal cell identification codes containing three, four, or six bits, respectively, to implement a distance based tracking strategy. These schemes do not have errors in determining cell distance in existing hexagonal based cellular networks. Another application is for connection rerouting in cellular networks during a path extension process.

Input/output performance on current parallel file systems is sensitive to a good match of application access patterns to file system capabilities. Automatic input/output access pattern classification can determine application access patterns at execution time, guiding adaptive file system policies. In this paper, we examine and compare two novel input/output access pattern classification methods based on learning algorithms. The first approach uses a feedforward neural network previously trained on access pattern benchmarks to generate qualitative classifications. The second approach uses hidden Markov models trained on access patterns from previous executions to create a probabilistic model of input/output accesses. In a parallel application, access patterns can be recognized at the level of each local thread or as the global interleaving of all application threads. Classification of patterns at both levels is important for parallel file system performance; we propose a method for forming global classifications from local classifications. We present results from parallel and sequential benchmarks and applications that demonstrate the viability of this approach.

Linda is an elegant parallel and distributed programming model. It is based on a shared associative memory, structured in tuples. We show that this model suffers from the false matching phenomenon. We explain under which conditions this problem occurs, we examine the solutions already proposed to solve it, and we show why they are not sufficient. In this framework, our goal is to propose an extension to the Linda model in order to eliminate the false matching phenomenon. This model-Linda with bound types or B-Linda-suitable for modern programming paradigms, adds an extended-type notion into the basic Linda model. It is first introduced in an informal manner, then we present an implementation of it. Some formal aspects are specified in the appendix: The definition of the model's elements and operational semantics.

Gathering sensed information in an energy efficient manner is critical to operating the sensor network for a long period of time. The LEACH protocol presented by Heinzelman et al. (2000) is an elegant solution where clusters are formed to fuse data before transmitting to the base station. In this paper, we present an improved scheme, called PEGASIS (power-efficient gathering in sensor information systems), which is a near-optimal chain-based protocol that minimizes energy. In PEGASIS, each node communicates only with a close neighbor and takes turns transmitting to the base station, thus reducing the amount of energy spent per round. Simulation results show that PEGASIS performs better than LEACH. For many applications, in addition to minimizing energy, it is also important to consider the delay incurred in gathering sensed data. We capture this with the energy /spl times/ delay metric and present schemes that attempt to balance the energy and delay cost for data gathering from sensor networks. We present two new schemes to minimize energy /spl times/ delay using CDMA and non-CDMA sensor nodes. We compared the performance of direct, LEACH, and our schemes with respect to energy /spl times/ delay using extensive simulations for different network sizes. Results show that our schemes perform 80 or more times better than the direct scheme and also outperform the LEACH protocol.

In the literature, there are quite a few sequential and parallel algorithms for solving problems on distance-hereditary graphs. With an n-vertex and m-edge distance-hereditary graph G, we show that the efficient domination problem on G can be solved in O(log/sup 2/ n) time using O(n + m) processors on a CREW PRAM. Moreover, if a binary tree representation of G is given, the problem can be optimally solved in O(log n) time using O(n/log n) processors on an EREW PRAM.