Advanced information processing system: The Army fault tolerant architecture conceptual study. Volume 2: Army fault tolerant architecture design and analysis

Described here is the Army Fault Tolerant Architecture (AFTA) hardware architecture and components and the operating system. The architectural and operational theory of the AFTA Fault Tolerant Data Bus is discussed. The test and maintenance strategy developed for use in fielded AFTA installations is presented. An approach to be used in reducing the probability of AFTA failure due to common mode faults is described. Analytical models for AFTA performance, reliability, availability, life cycle cost, weight, power, and volume are developed. An approach is presented for using VHSIC Hardware Description Language (VHDL) to describe and design AFTA's developmental hardware. A plan is described for verifying and validating key AFTA concepts during the Dem/Val phase. Analytical models and partial mission requirements are used to generate AFTA configurations for the TF/TA/NOE and Ground Vehicle missions

Novel algorithms for fair bandwidth sharing on counter rotating rings

Rings are often preferred technology for networks as ring networks can virtually create fully connected mesh networks efficiently and they are also easy to manage. However, providing fair service to all the stations on the ring is not always easy to achieve. In order to capitalize on the advantages of ring networks, new buffer insertion techniques, such as Spatial Reuse Protocol (SRP), were introduced in early 2000s. As a result, a new standard known as IEEE 802.17 Resilient Packet Ring was defined in 2004 by the IEEE Resilient Packet Ring (RPR) Working Group. Since then two addenda have been introduced; namely, IEEE 802.17a and IEEE 802.17b in 2006 and 2010, respectively. During this standardization process, weighted fairness and queue management schemes were proposed to be used in the standard. As shown in this dissertation, these schemes can be applied to solve the fairness issues noted widely in the research community as radical changes are not practical to introduce within the context of a standard. In this dissertation, the weighted fairness aspects of IEEE 802.17 RPR (in the aggressive mode of operation) are studied; various properties are demonstrated and observed via network simulations, and additional improvements are suggested. These aspects have not been well studied until now, and can be used to alleviate some of the issues observed in the fairness algorithm under some scenarios. Also, this dissertation focuses on the RPR Medium Access Control (MAC) Client implementation of the IEEE 802.17 RPR MAC in the aggressive mode of operation and introduces a new active queue management scheme for ring networks that achieves higher overall utilization of the ring bandwidth with simpler and less expensive implementation than the generic implementation provided in the standard. The two schemes introduced in this dissertation provide performance comparable to the per destination queuing implementation, which yields the best achievable performance at the expense of the cost of implementation. In addition, till now the requirements for sizing secondary transit queue of IEEE 802.17 RPR stations (in the aggressive mode of operation) have not been properly investigated. The analysis and suggested improvements presented in this dissertation are then supported by performance evaluation results and theoretical calculations. Last, but not least, the impact of using different capacity links on the same ring has not been investigated before from the ring utilization and fairness points of view. This dissertation also investigates utilizing different capacity links in RPR and proposes a mechanism to support the same

Journal of Telecommunications in Higher Education

This Issue: Integrating Networks ATM: It\u27s All That Matters ATM Delivers Voice, Data, Video Cabling the Integrated Network Interview: Robert Collet, Data Services & Network Systems BYU: Striving for Excellence in Telecom Service

Journal of Telecommunications in Higher Education

This Issue: Integrating Networks ATM: It\u27s All That Matters ATM Delivers Voice, Data, Video Cabling the Integrated Network Interview: Robert Collet, Data Services & Network Systems BYU: Striving for Excellence in Telecom Service

Network time : synchronisation in real time distributed computing systems

In the past, network clock synchronization has been sufficient for the needs of traditional distributed systems, for such purposes as maintaining Network File Systems, enabling Internet mail services and supporting other applications that require a degree of clock synchronization. Increasingly real time systems arc requiring high degrees of time synchronization. Where this is required, the common approach up until now has been to distribute the clock to each processor by means of hardware (e.g. GPS and cesium clocks) or to distribute time by means of an additional dedicated timing network. Whilst this has proved successful for real time systems, the use of present day high speed networks with definable quality of service from the protocol layers has lead to the possibility of using the existing data network to distribute the time. This thesis demonstrates that by using system integration and implementation of commercial off the shelf (COTS) products it is possible to distribute and coordinate the time of the computer time clocks to microsecond range. Thus providing close enough synchronization to support real time systems whilst avoiding the additional time, infrastructure and money needed to build and maintain a specialized timing network