7,535 research outputs found
Unravelling the Impact of Temporal and Geographical Locality in Content Caching Systems
To assess the performance of caching systems, the definition of a proper
process describing the content requests generated by users is required.
Starting from the analysis of traces of YouTube video requests collected inside
operational networks, we identify the characteristics of real traffic that need
to be represented and those that instead can be safely neglected. Based on our
observations, we introduce a simple, parsimonious traffic model, named Shot
Noise Model (SNM), that allows us to capture temporal and geographical locality
of content popularity. The SNM is sufficiently simple to be effectively
employed in both analytical and scalable simulative studies of caching systems.
We demonstrate this by analytically characterizing the performance of the LRU
caching policy under the SNM, for both a single cache and a network of caches.
With respect to the standard Independent Reference Model (IRM), some
paradigmatic shifts, concerning the impact of various traffic characteristics
on cache performance, clearly emerge from our results.Comment: 14 pages, 11 Figures, 2 Appendice
Tracking control with adaption of kites
A novel tracking paradigm for flying geometric trajectories using tethered
kites is presented. It is shown how the differential-geometric notion of
turning angle can be used as a one-dimensional representation of the kite
trajectory, and how this leads to a single-input single-output (SISO) tracking
problem. Based on this principle a Lyapunov-based nonlinear adaptive controller
is developed that only needs control derivatives of the kite aerodynamic model.
The resulting controller is validated using simulations with a point-mass kite
model.Comment: 20 pages, 12 figure
Space Time MUSIC: Consistent Signal Subspace Estimation for Wide-band Sensor Arrays
Wide-band Direction of Arrival (DOA) estimation with sensor arrays is an
essential task in sonar, radar, acoustics, biomedical and multimedia
applications. Many state of the art wide-band DOA estimators coherently process
frequency binned array outputs by approximate Maximum Likelihood, Weighted
Subspace Fitting or focusing techniques. This paper shows that bin signals
obtained by filter-bank approaches do not obey the finite rank narrow-band
array model, because spectral leakage and the change of the array response with
frequency within the bin create \emph{ghost sources} dependent on the
particular realization of the source process. Therefore, existing DOA
estimators based on binning cannot claim consistency even with the perfect
knowledge of the array response. In this work, a more realistic array model
with a finite length of the sensor impulse responses is assumed, which still
has finite rank under a space-time formulation. It is shown that signal
subspaces at arbitrary frequencies can be consistently recovered under mild
conditions by applying MUSIC-type (ST-MUSIC) estimators to the dominant
eigenvectors of the wide-band space-time sensor cross-correlation matrix. A
novel Maximum Likelihood based ST-MUSIC subspace estimate is developed in order
to recover consistency. The number of sources active at each frequency are
estimated by Information Theoretic Criteria. The sample ST-MUSIC subspaces can
be fed to any subspace fitting DOA estimator at single or multiple frequencies.
Simulations confirm that the new technique clearly outperforms binning
approaches at sufficiently high signal to noise ratio, when model mismatches
exceed the noise floor.Comment: 15 pages, 10 figures. Accepted in a revised form by the IEEE Trans.
on Signal Processing on 12 February 1918. @IEEE201
Online VNF Scaling in Datacenters
Network Function Virtualization (NFV) is a promising technology that promises
to significantly reduce the operational costs of network services by deploying
virtualized network functions (VNFs) to commodity servers in place of dedicated
hardware middleboxes. The VNFs are typically running on virtual machine
instances in a cloud infrastructure, where the virtualization technology
enables dynamic provisioning of VNF instances, to process the fluctuating
traffic that needs to go through the network functions in a network service. In
this paper, we target dynamic provisioning of enterprise network services -
expressed as one or multiple service chains - in cloud datacenters, and design
efficient online algorithms without requiring any information on future traffic
rates. The key is to decide the number of instances of each VNF type to
provision at each time, taking into consideration the server resource
capacities and traffic rates between adjacent VNFs in a service chain. In the
case of a single service chain, we discover an elegant structure of the problem
and design an efficient randomized algorithm achieving a e/(e-1) competitive
ratio. For multiple concurrent service chains, an online heuristic algorithm is
proposed, which is O(1)-competitive. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our
algorithms using solid theoretical analysis and trace-driven simulations.Comment: 9 pages, 4 figure
The stellar mass to light ratio in the isolated spiral NGC 4414
We present high resolution CO(1-0) interferometric observations and deep HST
B-V-I images of the flocculent isolated Sc type spiral NGC 4414. The goal is to
determine the stellar mass-to-light (M/L) ratio in a galactic disk. The stars
are seen without a dust screen, the central gas mass is very low (undetected),
and we show that the dark matter is negligible in the central regions. We have
developed an axisymmetric analytical gravitational potential model to account
for the central light (mass) profile, the dynamics of the molecular gas in the
highly obscured molecular ring, and the stellar light profile outside the
highly obscured region. The contribution of dark matter is constrained by the
extremely extended HI rotation curve and is small, possibly negligible, at
distances less than 5 -- 7 kpc from the center. Furthermore, the M/L ratios we
derive are low, about 1.5 in I band and 0.5 in K' band. The B and V band M/L
ratios vary greatly due to absorption by dust, reaching 4 in the molecular ring
and decreasing to about 1.6 -- 1.8 at larger radii. This unequivocally shows
that models, like most maximum disk models, assuming constant M/L ratios in an
optical waveband, simply are not appropriate. We illustrate this by making mock
maximum disk models with a constant V band M/L ratio. The key is having the
central light distribution unobscured such that it can be used to trace the
mass. A primitive attempt to determine the intrinsic M/L ratio yields values
close to unity in the B,V, and I bands and slightly below 0.5 in K'.Comment: 12 pages, 10 figures, accepted in A&
A truthful (1-É›)-optimal mechanism for on-demand cloud resource provisioning
On-demand resource provisioning in cloud computing provides tailor-made resource packages (typically in the form of VMs) to meet users’ demands. Public clouds nowadays provide more and more elaborated types of VMs, but have yet to offer the most flexible dynamic VM assembly, which is partly due to the lack of a mature mechanism for pricing tailor-made VMs on the spot. This work proposes an efficient randomized auction mechanism based on a novel application of smoothed analysis and randomized reduction, for dynamic VM provisioning and pricing in geo-distributed cloud data centers. This auction, to the best of our knowledge, is the first one in literature that achieves (i) truthfulness in expectation, (ii) polynomial running time in expectation, and (iii) (1-ɛ)-optimal social welfare in expectation for resource allocation, where ɛ can be arbitrarily close to 0. Our mechanism consists of three modules: (1) an exact algorithm to solve the NP-hard social welfare maximization problem, which runs in polynomial time in expectation, (2) a perturbation-based randomized resource allocation scheme which produces a VM provisioning solution that is (1-ɛ)-optimal and (3) an auction mechanism that applies the perturbation-based scheme for dynamic VM provisioning and prices the customized VMs using a randomized VCG payment, with a guarantee in truthfulness in expectation. We validate the efficacy of the mechanism through careful theoretical analysis and trace-driven simulations.published_or_final_versio
Cloud Index Tracking: Enabling Predictable Costs in Cloud Spot Markets
Cloud spot markets rent VMs for a variable price that is typically much lower
than the price of on-demand VMs, which makes them attractive for a wide range
of large-scale applications. However, applications that run on spot VMs suffer
from cost uncertainty, since spot prices fluctuate, in part, based on supply,
demand, or both. The difficulty in predicting spot prices affects users and
applications: the former cannot effectively plan their IT expenditures, while
the latter cannot infer the availability and performance of spot VMs, which are
a function of their variable price. To address the problem, we use properties
of cloud infrastructure and workloads to show that prices become more stable
and predictable as they are aggregated together. We leverage this observation
to define an aggregate index price for spot VMs that serves as a reference for
what users should expect to pay. We show that, even when the spot prices for
individual VMs are volatile, the index price remains stable and predictable. We
then introduce cloud index tracking: a migration policy that tracks the index
price to ensure applications running on spot VMs incur a predictable cost by
migrating to a new spot VM if the current VM's price significantly deviates
from the index price.Comment: ACM Symposium on Cloud Computing 201
Virtual Organization Clusters: Self-Provisioned Clouds on the Grid
Virtual Organization Clusters (VOCs) provide a novel architecture for overlaying dedicated cluster systems on existing grid infrastructures. VOCs provide customized, homogeneous execution environments on a per-Virtual Organization basis, without the cost of physical cluster construction or the overhead of per-job containers. Administrative access and overlay network capabilities are granted to Virtual Organizations (VOs) that choose to implement VOC technology, while the system remains completely transparent to end users and non-participating VOs. Unlike alternative systems that require explicit leases, VOCs are autonomically self-provisioned according to configurable usage policies. As a grid computing architecture, VOCs are designed to be technology agnostic and are implementable by any combination of software and services that follows the Virtual Organization Cluster Model. As demonstrated through simulation testing and evaluation of an implemented prototype, VOCs are a viable mechanism for increasing end-user job compatibility on grid sites. On existing production grids, where jobs are frequently submitted to a small subset of sites and thus experience high queuing delays relative to average job length, the grid-wide addition of VOCs does not adversely affect mean job sojourn time. By load-balancing jobs among grid sites, VOCs can reduce the total amount of queuing on a grid to a level sufficient to counteract the performance overhead introduced by virtualization
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