From MARTE to Reconfigurable NoCs: A model driven design methodology

Due to the continuous exponential rise in SoC's design complexity, there is a critical need to find new seamless methodologies and tools to handle the SoC co-design aspects. We address this issue and propose a novel SoC co-design methodology based on Model Driven Engineering and the MARTE (Modeling and Analysis of Real-Time and Embedded Systems) standard proposed by Object Management Group, to raise the design abstraction levels. Extensions of this standard have enabled us to move from high level specifications to execution platforms such as reconfigurable FPGAs. In this paper, we present a high level modeling approach that targets modern Network on Chips systems. The overall objective: to perform system modeling at a high abstraction level expressed in Unified Modeling Language (UML); and afterwards, transform these high level models into detailed enriched lower level models in order to automatically generate the necessary code for final FPGA synthesis

Applying Formal Methods to Networking: Theory, Techniques and Applications

Despite its great importance, modern network infrastructure is remarkable for the lack of rigor in its engineering. The Internet which began as a research experiment was never designed to handle the users and applications it hosts today. The lack of formalization of the Internet architecture meant limited abstractions and modularity, especially for the control and management planes, thus requiring for every new need a new protocol built from scratch. This led to an unwieldy ossified Internet architecture resistant to any attempts at formal verification, and an Internet culture where expediency and pragmatism are favored over formal correctness. Fortunately, recent work in the space of clean slate Internet design---especially, the software defined networking (SDN) paradigm---offers the Internet community another chance to develop the right kind of architecture and abstractions. This has also led to a great resurgence in interest of applying formal methods to specification, verification, and synthesis of networking protocols and applications. In this paper, we present a self-contained tutorial of the formidable amount of work that has been done in formal methods, and present a survey of its applications to networking.Comment: 30 pages, submitted to IEEE Communications Surveys and Tutorial

The Thermodynamics of Network Coding, and an Algorithmic Refinement of the Principle of Maximum Entropy

The principle of maximum entropy (Maxent) is often used to obtain prior probability distributions as a method to obtain a Gibbs measure under some restriction giving the probability that a system will be in a certain state compared to the rest of the elements in the distribution. Because classical entropy-based Maxent collapses cases confounding all distinct degrees of randomness and pseudo-randomness, here we take into consideration the generative mechanism of the systems considered in the ensemble to separate objects that may comply with the principle under some restriction and whose entropy is maximal but may be generated recursively from those that are actually algorithmically random offering a refinement to classical Maxent. We take advantage of a causal algorithmic calculus to derive a thermodynamic-like result based on how difficult it is to reprogram a computer code. Using the distinction between computable and algorithmic randomness we quantify the cost in information loss associated with reprogramming. To illustrate this we apply the algorithmic refinement to Maxent on graphs and introduce a Maximal Algorithmic Randomness Preferential Attachment (MARPA) Algorithm, a generalisation over previous approaches. We discuss practical implications of evaluation of network randomness. Our analysis provides insight in that the reprogrammability asymmetry appears to originate from a non-monotonic relationship to algorithmic probability. Our analysis motivates further analysis of the origin and consequences of the aforementioned asymmetries, reprogrammability, and computation.Comment: 30 page

Size bounds and parallel algorithms for networks

SIGLEAvailable from British Library Document Supply Centre- DSC:D34009/81 / BLDSC - British Library Document Supply CentreGBUnited Kingdo

Multicoloured Random Graphs: Constructions and Symmetry

This is a research monograph on constructions of and group actions on countable homogeneous graphs, concentrating particularly on the simple random graph and its edge-coloured variants. We study various aspects of the graphs, but the emphasis is on understanding those groups that are supported by these graphs together with links with other structures such as lattices, topologies and filters, rings and algebras, metric spaces, sets and models, Moufang loops and monoids. The large amount of background material included serves as an introduction to the theories that are used to produce the new results. The large number of references should help in making this a resource for anyone interested in beginning research in this or allied fields.Comment: Index added in v2. This is the first of 3 documents; the other 2 will appear in physic

Combinatorial Optimization

This report summarizes the meeting on Combinatorial Optimization where new and promising developments in the field were discussed. Th

Rayleigh random flights on the Poisson line SIRSN

We study scale-invariant Rayleigh Random Flights (“RRF”) in random environments given by planar Scale-Invariant Random Spatial Networks (“SIRSN”) based on speed-marked Poisson line processes. A natural one-parameter family of such RRF (with scale-invariant dynamics) can be viewed as producing “randomly-broken local geodesics” on the SIRSN; we aim to shed some light on a conjecture that a (non-broken) geodesic on such a SIRSN will never come to a complete stop en route. (If true, then all such geodesics can be represented as doubly-infinite sequences of sequentially connected line segments. This would justify a natural procedure for computing geodesics.) The family of these RRF (“SIRSN-RRF”), is introduced via a novel axiomatic theory of abstract scattering representations for Markov chains (itself of independent interest). Palm conditioning (specifically the Mecke-Slivnyak theorem for Palm probabilities of Poisson point processes) and ideas from the ergodic theory of random walks in random environments are used to show that at a critical value of the parameter the speed of the scale-invariant SIRSN-RRF neither diverges to infinity nor tends to zero, thus supporting the conjecture