8,009 research outputs found
Gossip Algorithms for Distributed Signal Processing
Gossip algorithms are attractive for in-network processing in sensor networks
because they do not require any specialized routing, there is no bottleneck or
single point of failure, and they are robust to unreliable wireless network
conditions. Recently, there has been a surge of activity in the computer
science, control, signal processing, and information theory communities,
developing faster and more robust gossip algorithms and deriving theoretical
performance guarantees. This article presents an overview of recent work in the
area. We describe convergence rate results, which are related to the number of
transmitted messages and thus the amount of energy consumed in the network for
gossiping. We discuss issues related to gossiping over wireless links,
including the effects of quantization and noise, and we illustrate the use of
gossip algorithms for canonical signal processing tasks including distributed
estimation, source localization, and compression.Comment: Submitted to Proceedings of the IEEE, 29 page
Dependability in Aggregation by Averaging
Aggregation is an important building block of modern distributed
applications, allowing the determination of meaningful properties (e.g. network
size, total storage capacity, average load, majorities, etc.) that are used to
direct the execution of the system. However, the majority of the existing
aggregation algorithms exhibit relevant dependability issues, when prospecting
their use in real application environments. In this paper, we reveal some
dependability issues of aggregation algorithms based on iterative averaging
techniques, giving some directions to solve them. This class of algorithms is
considered robust (when compared to common tree-based approaches), being
independent from the used routing topology and providing an aggregation result
at all nodes. However, their robustness is strongly challenged and their
correctness often compromised, when changing the assumptions of their working
environment to more realistic ones. The correctness of this class of algorithms
relies on the maintenance of a fundamental invariant, commonly designated as
"mass conservation". We will argue that this main invariant is often broken in
practical settings, and that additional mechanisms and modifications are
required to maintain it, incurring in some degradation of the algorithms
performance. In particular, we discuss the behavior of three representative
algorithms Push-Sum Protocol, Push-Pull Gossip protocol and Distributed Random
Grouping under asynchronous and faulty (with message loss and node crashes)
environments. More specifically, we propose and evaluate two new versions of
the Push-Pull Gossip protocol, which solve its message interleaving problem
(evidenced even in a synchronous operation mode).Comment: 14 pages. Presented in Inforum 200
Emitter Location Finding using Particle Swarm Optimization
Using several spatially separated receivers, nowadays positioning techniques, which are implemented to determine the location of the transmitter, are often required for several important disciplines such as military, security, medical, and commercial applications. In this study, localization is carried out by particle swarm optimization using time difference of arrival. In order to increase the positioning accuracy, time difference of arrival averaging based two new methods are proposed. Results are compared with classical algorithms and Cramer-Rao lower bound which is the theoretical limit of the estimation error
A Low-Cost Robust Distributed Linearly Constrained Beamformer for Wireless Acoustic Sensor Networks with Arbitrary Topology
We propose a new robust distributed linearly constrained beamformer which
utilizes a set of linear equality constraints to reduce the cross power
spectral density matrix to a block-diagonal form. The proposed beamformer has a
convenient objective function for use in arbitrary distributed network
topologies while having identical performance to a centralized implementation.
Moreover, the new optimization problem is robust to relative acoustic transfer
function (RATF) estimation errors and to target activity detection (TAD)
errors. Two variants of the proposed beamformer are presented and evaluated in
the context of multi-microphone speech enhancement in a wireless acoustic
sensor network, and are compared with other state-of-the-art distributed
beamformers in terms of communication costs and robustness to RATF estimation
errors and TAD errors
Location-Aided Fast Distributed Consensus in Wireless Networks
Existing works on distributed consensus explore linear iterations based on
reversible Markov chains, which contribute to the slow convergence of the
algorithms. It has been observed that by overcoming the diffusive behavior of
reversible chains, certain nonreversible chains lifted from reversible ones mix
substantially faster than the original chains. In this paper, we investigate
the idea of accelerating distributed consensus via lifting Markov chains, and
propose a class of Location-Aided Distributed Averaging (LADA) algorithms for
wireless networks, where nodes' coarse location information is used to
construct nonreversible chains that facilitate distributed computing and
cooperative processing. First, two general pseudo-algorithms are presented to
illustrate the notion of distributed averaging through chain-lifting. These
pseudo-algorithms are then respectively instantiated through one LADA algorithm
on grid networks, and one on general wireless networks. For a grid
network, the proposed LADA algorithm achieves an -averaging time of
. Based on this algorithm, in a wireless network with
transmission range , an -averaging time of
can be attained through a centralized algorithm.
Subsequently, we present a fully-distributed LADA algorithm for wireless
networks, which utilizes only the direction information of neighbors to
construct nonreversible chains. It is shown that this distributed LADA
algorithm achieves the same scaling law in averaging time as the centralized
scheme. Finally, we propose a cluster-based LADA (C-LADA) algorithm, which,
requiring no central coordination, provides the additional benefit of reduced
message complexity compared with the distributed LADA algorithm.Comment: 44 pages, 14 figures. Submitted to IEEE Transactions on Information
Theor
Consensus and Products of Random Stochastic Matrices: Exact Rate for Convergence in Probability
Distributed consensus and other linear systems with system stochastic
matrices emerge in various settings, like opinion formation in social
networks, rendezvous of robots, and distributed inference in sensor networks.
The matrices are often random, due to, e.g., random packet dropouts in
wireless sensor networks. Key in analyzing the performance of such systems is
studying convergence of matrix products . In this paper, we
find the exact exponential rate for the convergence in probability of the
product of such matrices when time grows large, under the assumption that
the 's are symmetric and independent identically distributed in time.
Further, for commonly used random models like with gossip and link failure, we
show that the rate is found by solving a min-cut problem and, hence, easily
computable. Finally, we apply our results to optimally allocate the sensors'
transmission power in consensus+innovations distributed detection
Can smartwatches replace smartphones for posture tracking?
This paper introduces a human posture tracking platform to identify the human postures of sitting, standing or lying down, based on a smartwatch. This work develops such a system as a proof-of-concept study to investigate a smartwatch's ability to be used in future remote health monitoring systems and applications. This work validates the smartwatches' ability to track the posture of users accurately in a laboratory setting while reducing the sampling rate to potentially improve battery life, the first steps in verifying that such a system would work in future clinical settings. The algorithm developed classifies the transitions between three posture states of sitting, standing and lying down, by identifying these transition movements, as well as other movements that might be mistaken for these transitions. The system is trained and developed on a Samsung Galaxy Gear smartwatch, and the algorithm was validated through a leave-one-subject-out cross-validation of 20 subjects. The system can identify the appropriate transitions at only 10 Hz with an F-score of 0.930, indicating its ability to effectively replace smart phones, if needed
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