Decentralised control of material or traffic flows in networks using phase-synchronisation

We present a self-organising, decentralised control method for material flows in networks. The concept applies to networks where time sharing mechanisms between conflicting flows in nodes are required and where a coordination of these local switches on a system-wide level can improve the performance. We show that, under certain assumptions, the control of nodes can be mapped to a network of phase-oscillators. By synchronising these oscillators, the desired global coordination is achieved. We illustrate the method in the example of traffic signal control for road networks. The proposed concept is flexible, adaptive, robust and decentralised. It can be transferred to other queuing networks such as production systems. Our control approach makes use of simple synchronisation principles found in various biological systems in order to obtain collective behaviour from local interactions

Transient Information Flow in a Network of Excitatory and Inhibitory Model Neurons: Role of Noise and Signal Autocorrelation

We investigate the performance of sparsely-connected networks of integrate-and-fire neurons for ultra-short term information processing. We exploit the fact that the population activity of networks with balanced excitation and inhibition can switch from an oscillatory firing regime to a state of asynchronous irregular firing or quiescence depending on the rate of external background spikes. We find that in terms of information buffering the network performs best for a moderate, non-zero, amount of noise. Analogous to the phenomenon of stochastic resonance the performance decreases for higher and lower noise levels. The optimal amount of noise corresponds to the transition zone between a quiescent state and a regime of stochastic dynamics. This provides a potential explanation on the role of non-oscillatory population activity in a simplified model of cortical micro-circuits.Comment: 27 pages, 7 figures, to appear in J. Physiology (Paris) Vol. 9

On the effect of combining cooperative communication with sleep mode

Cooperation is crucial in (next-generation) wireless networks as it can greatly attribute to ensuring connectivity, reliability, performance, ... Relaying looks promising in a wide variety of network types (cellular, ad-hoc on-demand), each using a certain protocol. Energy efficiency constitutes another key aspect of such networks, as battery power is often limited, and is typically achieved by sleep mode operation. As the range of applications is very broad, rather than modelling one of the protocols in detail, we construct a high-level model capturing the two essential characteristics of cooperation and energy efficiency: relaying and sleep mode, and study their interaction. The used analytical approach allows for accurate performance evaluation and enables us to unveil less trivial trade-offs and to formulate rules-of-thumb applicable across all potential scenarios

Multi-user synchronisation in ad-hoc OFDM-based wireless personal area networks

In this paper, a procedure for dealing with the multi-user synchronisation problem in Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple Access (OFDMA)-based systems for ad hoc environments is proposed and analysed. We show with this novel approach that it is possible to re-use much of the already extent literature for single-user synchronisation in OFDM and apply it to multi-user ad hoc scenarios. Also a distributed version of the procedure is proposed in order to fairly share out the power consumption among all the devices. The proposed procedure makes use of higher layer capabilities in a cross-layer design and it does not incur too much complexity or power. This issue is specially critical in wireless heterogeneous ad hoc networks where devices can be very limited in terms of transmission and/or computational power.Publicad

The politics of tourism development: a case of dual governance in Tobago

The purpose of this paper is to report on an exploratory study of the role that tourism policy plays in influencing tourism development. The research is based on two questions: How does tourism policy influence tourism development in the small twin-island state of Trinidad and Tobago? and How does an arrangement of dual governance in a small twin-island state promote tourism development? The exploration demonstrates that tourism development in the context of Tobago, the smaller of the two islands, has been slowed as a result of dual governance and hence dual policy arrangements

Automating the mean-field method for large dynamic gossip networks

We investigate an abstraction method, called mean- field method, for the performance evaluation of dynamic net- works with pairwise communication between nodes. It allows us to evaluate systems with very large numbers of nodes, that is, systems of a size where traditional performance evaluation methods fall short.\ud While the mean-field analysis is well-established in epidemics and for chemical reaction systems, it is rarely used for commu- nication networks because a mean-field model tends to abstract away the underlying topology.\ud To represent topological information, however, we extend the mean-field analysis with the concept of classes of states. At the abstraction level of classes we define the network topology by means of connectivity between nodes. This enables us to encode physical node positions and model dynamic networks by allowing nodes to change their class membership whenever they make a local state transition. Based on these extensions, we derive and implement algorithms for automating a mean-field based performance evaluation

Congestion probabilities in CDMA-based networks supporting batched Poisson traffic

We propose a new multirate teletraffic loss model for the calculation of time and call congestion probabilities in CDMA-based networks that accommodate calls of different serviceclasses whose arrival follows a batched Poisson process. The latter is more "peaked" and "bursty" than the ordinary Poisson process. The acceptance of calls in the system is based on the partial batch blocking discipline. This policy accepts a part of the batch (one or more calls) and discards the rest if the available resources are not enough to accept the whole batch. The proposed model takes into account the multiple access interference, the notion of local (soft) blocking, user’s activity and the interference cancellation. Although the analysis of the model does not lead to a product form solution of the steady state probabilities, we show that the calculation of the call-level performance metrics, time and call congestion probabilities, can be based on approximate but recursive formulas. The accuracy of the proposed formulas are verified through simulation and found to be quite satisfactory