10,158 research outputs found
Contrasting Views of Complexity and Their Implications For Network-Centric Infrastructures
There exists a widely recognized need to better understand
and manage complex âsystems of systems,â ranging from
biology, ecology, and medicine to network-centric technologies.
This is motivating the search for universal laws of highly evolved
systems and driving demand for new mathematics and methods
that are consistent, integrative, and predictive. However, the theoretical
frameworks available today are not merely fragmented
but sometimes contradictory and incompatible. We argue that
complexity arises in highly evolved biological and technological
systems primarily to provide mechanisms to create robustness.
However, this complexity itself can be a source of new fragility,
leading to ârobust yet fragileâ tradeoffs in system design. We
focus on the role of robustness and architecture in networked
infrastructures, and we highlight recent advances in the theory
of distributed control driven by network technologies. This view
of complexity in highly organized technological and biological systems
is fundamentally different from the dominant perspective in
the mainstream sciences, which downplays function, constraints,
and tradeoffs, and tends to minimize the role of organization and
design
Tight and simple Web graph compression
Analysing Web graphs has applications in determining page ranks, fighting Web
spam, detecting communities and mirror sites, and more. This study is however
hampered by the necessity of storing a major part of huge graphs in the
external memory, which prevents efficient random access to edge (hyperlink)
lists. A number of algorithms involving compression techniques have thus been
presented, to represent Web graphs succinctly but also providing random access.
Those techniques are usually based on differential encodings of the adjacency
lists, finding repeating nodes or node regions in the successive lists, more
general grammar-based transformations or 2-dimensional representations of the
binary matrix of the graph. In this paper we present two Web graph compression
algorithms. The first can be seen as engineering of the Boldi and Vigna (2004)
method. We extend the notion of similarity between link lists, and use a more
compact encoding of residuals. The algorithm works on blocks of varying size
(in the number of input lines) and sacrifices access time for better
compression ratio, achieving more succinct graph representation than other
algorithms reported in the literature. The second algorithm works on blocks of
the same size, in the number of input lines, and its key mechanism is merging
the block into a single ordered list. This method achieves much more attractive
space-time tradeoffs.Comment: 15 page
Systematic Topology Analysis and Generation Using Degree Correlations
We present a new, systematic approach for analyzing network topologies. We
first introduce the dK-series of probability distributions specifying all
degree correlations within d-sized subgraphs of a given graph G. Increasing
values of d capture progressively more properties of G at the cost of more
complex representation of the probability distribution. Using this series, we
can quantitatively measure the distance between two graphs and construct random
graphs that accurately reproduce virtually all metrics proposed in the
literature. The nature of the dK-series implies that it will also capture any
future metrics that may be proposed. Using our approach, we construct graphs
for d=0,1,2,3 and demonstrate that these graphs reproduce, with increasing
accuracy, important properties of measured and modeled Internet topologies. We
find that the d=2 case is sufficient for most practical purposes, while d=3
essentially reconstructs the Internet AS- and router-level topologies exactly.
We hope that a systematic method to analyze and synthesize topologies offers a
significant improvement to the set of tools available to network topology and
protocol researchers.Comment: Final versio
Conditional Lower Bounds for Space/Time Tradeoffs
In recent years much effort has been concentrated towards achieving
polynomial time lower bounds on algorithms for solving various well-known
problems. A useful technique for showing such lower bounds is to prove them
conditionally based on well-studied hardness assumptions such as 3SUM, APSP,
SETH, etc. This line of research helps to obtain a better understanding of the
complexity inside P.
A related question asks to prove conditional space lower bounds on data
structures that are constructed to solve certain algorithmic tasks after an
initial preprocessing stage. This question received little attention in
previous research even though it has potential strong impact.
In this paper we address this question and show that surprisingly many of the
well-studied hard problems that are known to have conditional polynomial time
lower bounds are also hard when concerning space. This hardness is shown as a
tradeoff between the space consumed by the data structure and the time needed
to answer queries. The tradeoff may be either smooth or admit one or more
singularity points.
We reveal interesting connections between different space hardness
conjectures and present matching upper bounds. We also apply these hardness
conjectures to both static and dynamic problems and prove their conditional
space hardness.
We believe that this novel framework of polynomial space conjectures can play
an important role in expressing polynomial space lower bounds of many important
algorithmic problems. Moreover, it seems that it can also help in achieving a
better understanding of the hardness of their corresponding problems in terms
of time
Solving k-center Clustering (with Outliers) in MapReduce and Streaming, almost as Accurately as Sequentially.
Center-based clustering is a fundamental primitive for data analysis and becomes very challenging for large datasets. In this paper, we focus on the popular k-center variant which, given a set S of points from some metric space and a parameter k0, the algorithms yield solutions whose approximation ratios are a mere additive term \u3f5 away from those achievable by the best known polynomial-time sequential algorithms, a result that substantially improves upon the state of the art. Our algorithms are rather simple and adapt to the intrinsic complexity of the dataset, captured by the doubling dimension D of the metric space. Specifically, our analysis shows that the algorithms become very space-efficient for the important case of small (constant) D. These theoretical results are complemented with a set of experiments on real-world and synthetic datasets of up to over a billion points, which show that our algorithms yield better quality solutions over the state of the art while featuring excellent scalability, and that they also lend themselves to sequential implementations much faster than existing ones
Towards a Theory of Scale-Free Graphs: Definition, Properties, and Implications (Extended Version)
Although the ``scale-free'' literature is large and growing, it gives neither
a precise definition of scale-free graphs nor rigorous proofs of many of their
claimed properties. In fact, it is easily shown that the existing theory has
many inherent contradictions and verifiably false claims. In this paper, we
propose a new, mathematically precise, and structural definition of the extent
to which a graph is scale-free, and prove a series of results that recover many
of the claimed properties while suggesting the potential for a rich and
interesting theory. With this definition, scale-free (or its opposite,
scale-rich) is closely related to other structural graph properties such as
various notions of self-similarity (or respectively, self-dissimilarity).
Scale-free graphs are also shown to be the likely outcome of random
construction processes, consistent with the heuristic definitions implicit in
existing random graph approaches. Our approach clarifies much of the confusion
surrounding the sensational qualitative claims in the scale-free literature,
and offers rigorous and quantitative alternatives.Comment: 44 pages, 16 figures. The primary version is to appear in Internet
Mathematics (2005
Space--Time Tradeoffs for Subset Sum: An Improved Worst Case Algorithm
The technique of Schroeppel and Shamir (SICOMP, 1981) has long been the most
efficient way to trade space against time for the SUBSET SUM problem. In the
random-instance setting, however, improved tradeoffs exist. In particular, the
recently discovered dissection method of Dinur et al. (CRYPTO 2012) yields a
significantly improved space--time tradeoff curve for instances with strong
randomness properties. Our main result is that these strong randomness
assumptions can be removed, obtaining the same space--time tradeoffs in the
worst case. We also show that for small space usage the dissection algorithm
can be almost fully parallelized. Our strategy for dealing with arbitrary
instances is to instead inject the randomness into the dissection process
itself by working over a carefully selected but random composite modulus, and
to introduce explicit space--time controls into the algorithm by means of a
"bailout mechanism"
Considering Pigeons for Carrying Delay Tolerant Networking based Internet traffic in Developing Countries
There are many regions in the developing world that suffer from poor infrastructure and lack of connection to the Internet and Public Switched Telephone Networks (PSTN). Delay Tolerant Networking (DTN) is a technology that has been advocated for providing store-and-forward network connectivity in these regions over the past few years. DTN often relies on human mobility in one form or another to support transportation of DTN data. This presents a socio-technical problem related to organizing how the data should be transported. In some situations the demand for DTN traffic can exceed that which is possible to support with human mobility, so alternative mechanisms are needed. In this paper we propose using live carrier pigeons (columba livia) to transport DTN data. Carrier pigeons have been used for transporting packets of information for a long time, but have not yet been seriously considered for transporting DTN traffic. We provide arguements that this mode of DTN data transport provides promise, and should receive attention from research and development projects. We provide an overview of pigeon characteristics to analyze the feasibility of using them for data transport, and present simulations of a DTN network that utilizes pigeon transport in order to provide an initial investigation into expected performance characteristics
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