The Role of Responsive Pricing in the Internet

The Internet continues to evolve as it reaches out to a wider user population. The recent introduction of user-friendly navigation and retrieval tools for the World Wide Web has triggered an unprecedented level of interest in the Internet among the media and the general public, as well as in the technical community. It seems inevitable that some changes or additions are needed in the control mechanisms used to allocate usage of Internet resources. In this paper, we argue that a feedback signal in the form of a variable price for network service is a workable tool to aid network operators in controlling Internet traffic. We suggest that these prices should vary dynamically based on the current utilization of network resources. We show how this responsive pricing puts control of network service back where it belongs: with the users.Internet, pricing, feedback, networks

Two-Hop Routing with Traffic-Differentiation for QoS Guarantee in Wireless Sensor Networks

This paper proposes a Traffic-Differentiated Two-Hop Routing protocol for Quality of Service (QoS) in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). It targets WSN applications having different types of data traffic with several priorities. The protocol achieves to increase Packet Reception Ratio (PRR) and reduce end-to-end delay while considering multi-queue priority policy, two-hop neighborhood information, link reliability and power efficiency. The protocol is modular and utilizes effective methods for estimating the link metrics. Numerical results show that the proposed protocol is a feasible solution to addresses QoS service differenti- ation for traffic with different priorities.Comment: 13 page

A Decentralized Mobile Computing Network for Multi-Robot Systems Operations

Collective animal behaviors are paradigmatic examples of fully decentralized operations involving complex collective computations such as collective turns in flocks of birds or collective harvesting by ants. These systems offer a unique source of inspiration for the development of fault-tolerant and self-healing multi-robot systems capable of operating in dynamic environments. Specifically, swarm robotics emerged and is significantly growing on these premises. However, to date, most swarm robotics systems reported in the literature involve basic computational tasks---averages and other algebraic operations. In this paper, we introduce a novel Collective computing framework based on the swarming paradigm, which exhibits the key innate features of swarms: robustness, scalability and flexibility. Unlike Edge computing, the proposed Collective computing framework is truly decentralized and does not require user intervention or additional servers to sustain its operations. This Collective computing framework is applied to the complex task of collective mapping, in which multiple robots aim at cooperatively map a large area. Our results confirm the effectiveness of the cooperative strategy, its robustness to the loss of multiple units, as well as its scalability. Furthermore, the topology of the interconnecting network is found to greatly influence the performance of the collective action.Comment: Accepted for Publication in Proc. 9th IEEE Annual Ubiquitous Computing, Electronics & Mobile Communication Conferenc

Gather-and-broadcast frequency control in power systems

We propose a novel frequency control approach in between centralized and distributed architectures, that is a continuous-time feedback control version of the dual decomposition optimization method. Specifically, a convex combination of the frequency measurements is centrally aggregated, followed by an integral control and a broadcast signal, which is then optimally allocated at local generation units. We show that our gather-and-broadcast control architecture comprises many previously proposed strategies as special cases. We prove local asymptotic stability of the closed-loop equilibria of the considered power system model, which is a nonlinear differential-algebraic system that includes traditional generators, frequency-responsive devices, as well as passive loads, where the sources are already equipped with primary droop control. Our feedback control is designed such that the closed-loop equilibria of the power system solve the optimal economic dispatch problem