19,811 research outputs found
An Improved Upper Bound for the Ring Loading Problem
The Ring Loading Problem emerged in the 1990s to model an important special
case of telecommunication networks (SONET rings) which gained attention from
practitioners and theorists alike. Given an undirected cycle on nodes
together with non-negative demands between any pair of nodes, the Ring Loading
Problem asks for an unsplittable routing of the demands such that the maximum
cumulated demand on any edge is minimized. Let be the value of such a
solution. In the relaxed version of the problem, each demand can be split into
two parts where the first part is routed clockwise while the second part is
routed counter-clockwise. Denote with the maximum load of a minimum split
routing solution. In a landmark paper, Schrijver, Seymour and Winkler [SSW98]
showed that , where is the maximum demand value. They
also found (implicitly) an instance of the Ring Loading Problem with . Recently, Skutella [Sku16] improved these bounds by showing that , and there exists an instance with .
We contribute to this line of research by showing that . We
also take a first step towards lower and upper bounds for small instances
Certainty Closure: Reliable Constraint Reasoning with Incomplete or Erroneous Data
Constraint Programming (CP) has proved an effective paradigm to model and
solve difficult combinatorial satisfaction and optimisation problems from
disparate domains. Many such problems arising from the commercial world are
permeated by data uncertainty. Existing CP approaches that accommodate
uncertainty are less suited to uncertainty arising due to incomplete and
erroneous data, because they do not build reliable models and solutions
guaranteed to address the user's genuine problem as she perceives it. Other
fields such as reliable computation offer combinations of models and associated
methods to handle these types of uncertain data, but lack an expressive
framework characterising the resolution methodology independently of the model.
We present a unifying framework that extends the CP formalism in both model
and solutions, to tackle ill-defined combinatorial problems with incomplete or
erroneous data. The certainty closure framework brings together modelling and
solving methodologies from different fields into the CP paradigm to provide
reliable and efficient approches for uncertain constraint problems. We
demonstrate the applicability of the framework on a case study in network
diagnosis. We define resolution forms that give generic templates, and their
associated operational semantics, to derive practical solution methods for
reliable solutions.Comment: Revised versio
Compact Routing on Internet-Like Graphs
The Thorup-Zwick (TZ) routing scheme is the first generic stretch-3 routing
scheme delivering a nearly optimal local memory upper bound. Using both direct
analysis and simulation, we calculate the stretch distribution of this routing
scheme on random graphs with power-law node degree distributions, . We find that the average stretch is very low and virtually
independent of . In particular, for the Internet interdomain graph,
, the average stretch is around 1.1, with up to 70% of paths
being shortest. As the network grows, the average stretch slowly decreases. The
routing table is very small, too. It is well below its upper bounds, and its
size is around 50 records for -node networks. Furthermore, we find that
both the average shortest path length (i.e. distance) and width of
the distance distribution observed in the real Internet inter-AS graph
have values that are very close to the minimums of the average stretch in the
- and -directions. This leads us to the discovery of a unique
critical quasi-stationary point of the average TZ stretch as a function of
and . The Internet distance distribution is located in a
close neighborhood of this point. This observation suggests the analytical
structure of the average stretch function may be an indirect indicator of some
hidden optimization criteria influencing the Internet's interdomain topology
evolution.Comment: 29 pages, 16 figure
Traffic matrix estimation on a large IP backbone: a comparison on real data
This paper considers the problem of estimating the point-to-point
traffic matrix in an operational IP backbone. Contrary to previous studies, that have used a partial traffic matrix or demands estimated from aggregated Netflow traces, we use a unique data set of complete traffic matrices from a global IP network measured over five-minute intervals. This allows us to do an accurate data analysis on the time-scale of typical link-load measurements and enables us to make a balanced evaluation of different traffic matrix estimation techniques. We describe the data collection infrastructure, present spatial and temporal demand distributions, investigate the stability of fan-out factors, and analyze the mean-variance relationships between demands. We perform a critical evaluation of existing and novel methods for traffic matrix estimation, including recursive fanout estimation, worst-case bounds, regularized estimation techniques, and methods that rely on mean-variance relationships. We discuss the weaknesses and strengths of the various methods, and highlight differences in the results for the European and American subnetworks
Asymptotically Optimal Approximation Algorithms for Coflow Scheduling
Many modern datacenter applications involve large-scale computations composed
of multiple data flows that need to be completed over a shared set of
distributed resources. Such a computation completes when all of its flows
complete. A useful abstraction for modeling such scenarios is a {\em coflow},
which is a collection of flows (e.g., tasks, packets, data transmissions) that
all share the same performance goal.
In this paper, we present the first approximation algorithms for scheduling
coflows over general network topologies with the objective of minimizing total
weighted completion time. We consider two different models for coflows based on
the nature of individual flows: circuits, and packets. We design
constant-factor polynomial-time approximation algorithms for scheduling
packet-based coflows with or without given flow paths, and circuit-based
coflows with given flow paths. Furthermore, we give an -approximation polynomial time algorithm for scheduling circuit-based
coflows where flow paths are not given (here is the number of network
edges).
We obtain our results by developing a general framework for coflow schedules,
based on interval-indexed linear programs, which may extend to other coflow
models and objective functions and may also yield improved approximation bounds
for specific network scenarios. We also present an experimental evaluation of
our approach for circuit-based coflows that show a performance improvement of
at least 22% on average over competing heuristics.Comment: Fixed minor typo
Routing versus energy optimization in a linear network
In wireless networks, devices (or nodes) often have a limited battery supply to use for the sending and reception of transmissions. By allowing nodes to relay messages for other nodes, the distance that needs to be bridged can be reduced, thus limiting the energy needed for a transmission. However, the number of transmissions a node needs to perform increases, costing more energy. Defining the lifetime of the network as the time until the first node depletes its battery, we investigate the impact of routing choices on the lifetime. In particular we focus on a linear network with nodes sending messages directly to all other nodes, or using full routing where transmissions are only sent to neighbouring nodes. We distinguish between networks with nodes on a grid or uniformly distributed and with full or random battery supply. Using simulation we validate our analytical results and discuss intermediate options for relaying of transmissions
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