WebWave: Globally Load Balanced Fully Distributed Caching of Hot Published Documents

Document publication service over such a large network as the Internet challenges us to harness available server and network resources to meet fast growing demand. In this paper, we show that large-scale dynamic caching can be employed to globally minimize server idle time, and hence maximize the aggregate server throughput of the whole service. To be efficient, scalable and robust, a successful caching mechanism must have three properties: (1) maximize the global throughput of the system, (2) find cache copies without recourse to a directory service, or to a discovery protocol, and (3) be completely distributed in the sense of operating only on the basis of local information. In this paper, we develop a precise definition, which we call tree load-balance (TLB), of what it means for a mechanism to satisfy these three goals. We present an algorithm that computes TLB off-line, and a distributed protocol that induces a load distribution that converges quickly to a TLB one. Both algorithms place cache copies of immutable documents, on the routing tree that connects the cached document's home server to its clients, thus enabling requests to stumble on cache copies en route to the home server.Harvard University; The Saudi Cultural Mission to the U.S.A

Smart PIN: performance and cost-oriented context-aware personal information network

The next generation of networks will involve interconnection of heterogeneous individual networks such as WPAN, WLAN, WMAN and Cellular network, adopting the IP as common infrastructural protocol and providing virtually always-connected network. Furthermore, there are many devices which enable easy acquisition and storage of information as pictures, movies, emails, etc. Therefore, the information overload and divergent content’s characteristics make it difficult for users to handle their data in manual way. Consequently, there is a need for personalised automatic services which would enable data exchange across heterogeneous network and devices. To support these personalised services, user centric approaches for data delivery across the heterogeneous network are also required. In this context, this thesis proposes Smart PIN - a novel performance and cost-oriented context-aware Personal Information Network. Smart PIN's architecture is detailed including its network, service and management components. Within the service component, two novel schemes for efficient delivery of context and content data are proposed: Multimedia Data Replication Scheme (MDRS) and Quality-oriented Algorithm for Multiple-source Multimedia Delivery (QAMMD). MDRS supports efficient data accessibility among distributed devices using data replication which is based on a utility function and a minimum data set. QAMMD employs a buffer underflow avoidance scheme for streaming, which achieves high multimedia quality without content adaptation to network conditions. Simulation models for MDRS and QAMMD were built which are based on various heterogeneous network scenarios. Additionally a multiple-source streaming based on QAMMS was implemented as a prototype and tested in an emulated network environment. Comparative tests show that MDRS and QAMMD perform significantly better than other approaches

Location and routing optimization protocols supporting internet host mobility

PhD ThesisWith the popularity of portable computers and the proliferation of wireless networking interfaces, there is currently a great deal of interest in providing IP networking support for host mobility using the Internet as a foundation for wireless networking. Most proposed solutions depend on a default route through the mobile host's horne address, which makes for unnecessarily long routes. The major problem that this gives rise to is that of finding an efficient way of locating and routing that allows datagrams to be delivered efficiently to moving destinations whilst limiting costly Internet-wide location updates as much as possible. Two concepts - "local region" and "patron service" - are introduced based on the locality features of the host movement and packet traffic patterns. For each mobile host, the local region is a set of designated subnetworks within which a mobile host often moves, and the patrons are the hosts from which the majority of traffic for the mobile host originated. By making use of the hierarchical addressing and routing structure of Internet, the two concepts are used to confine the effects of a host moving, so location updates are sent only to a designated host moving area and to those hosts which are most likely to call again, thus providing nearly optimal routing for most communication. The proposed scheme was implemented as an IP extension using a network simulator and evaluated from a system performance point of view. The results show a significant reduction in the accumulated communication time along with improved datagram tunneling, as compared with its extra location overhead. In addition, a comparison with another scheme shows that our functionality is more effective both for location update and routing efficiency. The scheme offers improved network and host scalability by isolating local movement from the rest of the world, and provides a convenient point at which to perform administration functions

Autonomous Replication in Wide-Area Internetworks

The number of users connected to the Internet has been growing at an exponential rate, resulting in similar increases in network traffic and Internet server load. Advances in microprocessors and network technologies have kept up with growth so far, but we are reaching the limits of hardware solutions. In order for the Internet's growth to continue, we must efficiently distribute server load and reduce the network traffic generated by its various services. Traditional wide-area caching schemes are client initiated. Decisions on where and when to cache information are made without the benefit of the server's global knowledge of the situation. We introduce a technique--push-caching--that is server initiated; it leaves caching decisions to the server. The server uses its knowledge of network topology, geography, and access patterns to minimize network traffic and server load. The World Wide Web is an example of a large-scale distributed information system that will benefit from this geographical distribution, and we present an architecture that allows a Web server to autonomously replicate Web files. We use a trace-driven simulation of the Internet to evaluate several competing caching strategies. Our results show that while simple client caching reduces server load and network bandwidth demands by up to 30%, adding server-initiated caching reduces server load by an additional 20% and network bandwidth demands by an additional 10%. Furthermore, push-caching is more efficient than client-caching, using an order of magnitude less cache space for comparable bandwidth and load savings. To determine the optimal cache consistency protocol we used a generic server simulator to evaluate several cache-consistency protocols, and found that weak consistency protocols are sufficient for the World Wide Web since they use the same bandwidth as an atomic protocol, impose less server load, and return stale data less than 1% of the time.Engineering and Applied Science

System support for object replication in distributed systems

Distributed systems are composed of a collection of cooperating but failure prone system components. The number of components in such systems is often large and, despite low probabilities of any particular component failing, the likelihood that there will be at least a small number of failures within the system at a given time is high. Therefore, distributed systems must be able to withstand partial failures. By being resilient to partial failures, a distributed system becomes more able to offer a dependable service and therefore more useful. Replication is a well known technique used to mask partial failures and increase reliability in distributed computer systems. However, replication management requires sophisticated distributed control algorithms, and is therefore a labour intensive and error prone task. Furthermore, replication is in most cases employed due to applications' non-functional requirements for reliability, as dependability is generally an orthogonal issue to the problem domain of the application. If system level support for replication is provided, the application developer can devote more effort to application specific issues. Distributed systems are inherently more complex than centralised systems. Encapsulation and abstraction of components and services can be of paramount importance in managing their complexity. The use of object oriented techniques and languages, providing support for encapsulation and abstraction, has made development of distributed systems more manageable. In systems where applications are being developed using object-oriented techniques, system support mechanisms must recognise this, and provide support for the object-oriented approach. The architecture presented exploits object-oriented techniques to improve transparency and to reduce the application programmer involvement required to use the replication mechanisms. This dissertation describes an approach to implementing system support for object replication, which is distinct from other approaches such as replicated objects in that objects are not specially designed for replication. Additionally, object replication, in contrast to data replication, is a function-shipping approach and deals with the replication of both operations and data. Object replication is complicated by objects' encapsulation of local state and the arbitrary interaction patterns that may exist among objects. Although fully transparent object replication has not been achieved, my thesis is that partial system support for replication of program-level objects is practicable and assists the development of certain classes of reliable distributed applications. I demonstrate the usefulness of this approach by describing a prototype implementation and showing how it supports the development of an example toy application. To increase their flexibility, the system support mechanisms described are tailorable. The approach adopted in this work is to provide partial support for object replication, relying on some assistance from the application developer to supply application dependent functionality within particular collators for dealing with processing of results from object replicas. Care is taken to make the programming model as simple and concise as possible

Resilience Strategies for Network Challenge Detection, Identification and Remediation

The enormous growth of the Internet and its use in everyday life make it an attractive target for malicious users. As the network becomes more complex and sophisticated it becomes more vulnerable to attack. There is a pressing need for the future internet to be resilient, manageable and secure. Our research is on distributed challenge detection and is part of the EU Resumenet Project (Resilience and Survivability for Future Networking: Framework, Mechanisms and Experimental Evaluation). It aims to make networks more resilient to a wide range of challenges including malicious attacks, misconfiguration, faults, and operational overloads. Resilience means the ability of the network to provide an acceptable level of service in the face of significant challenges; it is a superset of commonly used definitions for survivability, dependability, and fault tolerance. Our proposed resilience strategy could detect a challenge situation by identifying an occurrence and impact in real time, then initiating appropriate remedial action. Action is autonomously taken to continue operations as much as possible and to mitigate the damage, and allowing an acceptable level of service to be maintained. The contribution of our work is the ability to mitigate a challenge as early as possible and rapidly detect its root cause. Also our proposed multi-stage policy based challenge detection system identifies both the existing and unforeseen challenges. This has been studied and demonstrated with an unknown worm attack. Our multi stage approach reduces the computation complexity compared to the traditional single stage, where one particular managed object is responsible for all the functions. The approach we propose in this thesis has the flexibility, scalability, adaptability, reproducibility and extensibility needed to assist in the identification and remediation of many future network challenges