50,824 research outputs found
Is Our Model for Contention Resolution Wrong?
Randomized binary exponential backoff (BEB) is a popular algorithm for
coordinating access to a shared channel. With an operational history exceeding
four decades, BEB is currently an important component of several wireless
standards. Despite this track record, prior theoretical results indicate that
under bursty traffic (1) BEB yields poor makespan and (2) superior algorithms
are possible. To date, the degree to which these findings manifest in practice
has not been resolved.
To address this issue, we examine one of the strongest cases against BEB:
packets that simultaneously begin contending for the wireless channel. Using
Network Simulator 3, we compare against more recent algorithms that are
inspired by BEB, but whose makespan guarantees are superior. Surprisingly, we
discover that these newer algorithms significantly underperform. Through
further investigation, we identify as the culprit a flawed but common
abstraction regarding the cost of collisions. Our experimental results are
complemented by analytical arguments that the number of collisions -- and not
solely makespan -- is an important metric to optimize. We believe that these
findings have implications for the design of contention-resolution algorithms.Comment: Accepted to the 29th ACM Symposium on Parallelism in Algorithms and
Architectures (SPAA 2017
The Transactional Conflict Problem
The transactional conflict problem arises in transactional systems whenever
two or more concurrent transactions clash on a data item.
While the standard solution to such conflicts is to immediately abort one of
the transactions, some practical systems consider the alternative of delaying
conflict resolution for a short interval, which may allow one of the
transactions to commit. The challenge in the transactional conflict problem is
to choose the optimal length of this delay interval so as to minimize the
overall running time penalty for the conflicting transactions. In this paper,
we propose a family of optimal online algorithms for the transactional conflict
problem.
Specifically, we consider variants of this problem which arise in different
implementations of transactional systems, namely "requestor wins" and
"requestor aborts" implementations: in the former, the recipient of a coherence
request is aborted, whereas in the latter, it is the requestor which has to
abort. Both strategies are implemented by real systems.
We show that the requestor aborts case can be reduced to a classic instance
of the ski rental problem, while the requestor wins case leads to a new version
of this classical problem, for which we derive optimal deterministic and
randomized algorithms.
Moreover, we prove that, under a simplified adversarial model, our algorithms
are constant-competitive with the offline optimum in terms of throughput.
We validate our algorithmic results empirically through a hardware simulation
of hardware transactional memory (HTM), showing that our algorithms can lead to
non-trivial performance improvements for classic concurrent data structures
Architectures and Key Technical Challenges for 5G Systems Incorporating Satellites
Satellite Communication systems are a promising solution to extend and
complement terrestrial networks in unserved or under-served areas. This aspect
is reflected by recent commercial and standardisation endeavours. In
particular, 3GPP recently initiated a Study Item for New Radio-based, i.e., 5G,
Non-Terrestrial Networks aimed at deploying satellite systems either as a
stand-alone solution or as an integration to terrestrial networks in mobile
broadband and machine-type communication scenarios. However, typical satellite
channel impairments, as large path losses, delays, and Doppler shifts, pose
severe challenges to the realisation of a satellite-based NR network. In this
paper, based on the architecture options currently being discussed in the
standardisation fora, we discuss and assess the impact of the satellite channel
characteristics on the physical and Medium Access Control layers, both in terms
of transmitted waveforms and procedures for enhanced Mobile BroadBand (eMBB)
and NarrowBand-Internet of Things (NB-IoT) applications. The proposed analysis
shows that the main technical challenges are related to the PHY/MAC procedures,
in particular Random Access (RA), Timing Advance (TA), and Hybrid Automatic
Repeat reQuest (HARQ) and, depending on the considered service and
architecture, different solutions are proposed.Comment: Submitted to Transactions on Vehicular Technologies, April 201
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