A Data-Analysis and Sensitivity-Optimization Framework for the KATRIN Experiment

Presently under construction, the Karlsruhe TRitium Neutrino (KATRIN) experiment is the next generation tritium beta-decay experiment to perform a direct kinematical measurement of the electron neutrino mass with an unprecedented sensitivity of 200 meV (90% C.L.). This thesis describes the implementation of a consistent data analysis framework, addressing technical aspects of the data taking process and statistical challenges of a neutrino mass estimation from the beta-decay electron spectrum

Enhanced SOAP Performance for low bandwidth environments

It is desirable that SOAP performs efficiently in environments where there are a large number of transactions. However, SOAP is based on XML and therefore inherits XML's disadvantage of having voluminous messages. Firstly, the performance of different SOAP bindings is investigated. A benchmark of different SOAP bindings in wireless environments demonstrates the unsuitability of HTTP and TCP bindings in limited bandwidth environments. UDP is recommended as an alternative transport protocol for SOAP. Secondly, the thesis examines the use of multicast in reducing the traffic caused by SOAP messages in low bandwidth environments to deal with challenges described. A novel SOAP-level multicast protocol based on the similarity of SOAP messages, called SMP (Similarity-based SOAP Multicast Protocol), is proposed. In particular, issues of traffic, network optimization, response time and scalability are investigated. Lastly, two extensions of SMP are proposed to further improve the performance of SMP. SMP's extensions are two algorithms, greedy and incremental tc-SMP, for traffic-constrained similarity-based SOAP multicast. Tc-SMP optimizes network traffic by building its own spanning trees instead of using the one built by traditional methods, such as Dijkstra's algorithm. A new client is added to a tc-SMP tree through an existing tc-SMP node that causes minimal additional traffic for that connection. Detailed analytical models and experimental evaluations of the proposed methods demonstrate that combining SOAP messages of similar content and multicasting them as aggregated messages can significantly lower total network traffic. These improvements are advantageous for Web service applications that involve a high number of simultaneous similar transactions such as stock quotes, weather and sport event reports