Network-on-Chip

Addresses the Challenges Associated with System-on-Chip Integration Network-on-Chip: The Next Generation of System-on-Chip Integration examines the current issues restricting chip-on-chip communication efficiency, and explores Network-on-chip (NoC), a promising alternative that equips designers with the capability to produce a scalable, reusable, and high-performance communication backbone by allowing for the integration of a large number of cores on a single system-on-chip (SoC). This book provides a basic overview of topics associated with NoC-based design: communication infrastructure design, communication methodology, evaluation framework, and mapping of applications onto NoC. It details the design and evaluation of different proposed NoC structures, low-power techniques, signal integrity and reliability issues, application mapping, testing, and future trends. Utilizing examples of chips that have been implemented in industry and academia, this text presents the full architectural design of components verified through implementation in industrial CAD tools. It describes NoC research and developments, incorporates theoretical proofs strengthening the analysis procedures, and includes algorithms used in NoC design and synthesis. In addition, it considers other upcoming NoC issues, such as low-power NoC design, signal integrity issues, NoC testing, reconfiguration, synthesis, and 3-D NoC design. This text comprises 12 chapters and covers: The evolution of NoC from SoC—its research and developmental challenges NoC protocols, elaborating flow control, available network topologies, routing mechanisms, fault tolerance, quality-of-service support, and the design of network interfaces The router design strategies followed in NoCs The evaluation mechanism of NoC architectures The application mapping strategies followed in NoCs Low-power design techniques specifically followed in NoCs The signal integrity and reliability issues of NoC The details of NoC testing strategies reported so far The problem of synthesizing application-specific NoCs Reconfigurable NoC design issues Direction of future research and development in the field of NoC Network-on-Chip: The Next Generation of System-on-Chip Integration covers the basic topics, technology, and future trends relevant to NoC-based design, and can be used by engineers, students, and researchers and other industry professionals interested in computer architecture, embedded systems, and parallel/distributed systems

Scalable verification of probabilistic networks

This paper presents McNetKAT, a scalable tool for verifying probabilistic network programs. McNetKAT is based on a new semantics for the guarded and history-free fragment of Probabilistic NetKAT in terms of finite-state, absorbing Markov chains. This view allows the semantics of all programs to be computed exactly, enabling construction of an automatic verification tool. Domain-specific optimizations and a parallelizing backend enable McNetKAT to analyze networks with thousands of nodes, automatically reasoning about general properties such as probabilistic program equivalence and refinement, as well as networking properties such as resilience to failures. We evaluate McNetKAT’s scalability using real-world topologies, compare its performance against state-of-the-art tools, and develop an extended case study on a recently proposed data center network design

Mobile Ad-Hoc Networks

Being infrastructure-less and without central administration control, wireless ad-hoc networking is playing a more and more important role in extending the coverage of traditional wireless infrastructure (cellular networks, wireless LAN, etc). This book includes state-of-the-art techniques and solutions for wireless ad-hoc networks. It focuses on the following topics in ad-hoc networks: quality-of-service and video communication, routing protocol and cross-layer design. A few interesting problems about security and delay-tolerant networks are also discussed. This book is targeted to provide network engineers and researchers with design guidelines for large scale wireless ad hoc networks

Efficient Resource Allocation for Throughput Maximization in Next-Generation Networks

Software-Defined Networking (SDN) and Network Function Virtualization (NFV) have emerged as the foundation of the next-generation network architecture by introducing great flexibility and network automation capabilities, including automatic response to faults and load changes and programmatic provision of network resources and connections. It has been envisioned that the SDN- and NFV-based next-generation network architecture will play a critical role in providing network services to users, where the desired network services, including data transfer and policy enforcement, are fulfilled by allocating network resources using virtualization technologies. However, the disparity between ever-growing user demands and scarce network resources makes resource allocation exceptionally central to the performance of a network service, because only by effectively allocating these scarce resources can a network service provider satisfy users and maximize the gain from running the service. In this thesis, we study efficient resource allocation for network throughput maximization in next-generation networks, while meeting user resource demands and Quality of Service (QoS) requirements, subject to network resource capacities. This however poses great challenges, namely, (1) how to maximize network throughput, considering that both SDN-enabled switches and links are capacitated, (2) how to maximize the network throughput while taking into account network function and QoS requirements of users, (3) how to dynamically scale and readjust resource allocation for user requests, and (4) how to provision a network service that can satisfy user reliability requirements. To address these challenges, we provide a thorough study of network throughput maximization problems in the context of the next-generation network architecture, by formulating the problems as optimizations problems and developing novel optimization frameworks and algorithms for the problems. Specifically, this thesis makes the following contributions. Firstly, we consider dynamic user request admissions where user requests arrive one by one and the knowledge of future request arrivals is not given as a priori. We develop a novel cost model that accurately captures the usage costs of network resources and propose online algorithms with provable performance guarantees. Secondly, we study the problem of realizing user requests with network function requirements, with the objective of maximizing network throughput, while meeting user QoS requirements, subject to resource capacity constraints. For this problem, we develop two algorithms that strive for the trade-off between the accuracy/quality of a solution and the running time of obtaining the solution. Thirdly, we investigate maximization of network throughput by dynamically scaling network resources while minimizing the overall operational cost of a network. We propose a unified framework for two types of resource scaling {--} vertical scaling and horizontal scaling. Through non-trivial reductions of the problem of concern into several classic problems, we propose an algorithm that has been empirically demonstrated to deliver near-optimal solutions. Fourthly, we deal with the problem of reliability-aware provisioning of network resources for users, with the aim of maximizing network throughput. We devise an approximation algorithm with a logarithmic approximation ratio for the general case of this problem. We also develop constant-factor approximation and exact algorithm for two special cases of the problem, respectively. The formulated problem is a generalization of several classic optimization problems. Finally, in addition to extensive theoretical analyses, we also evaluate the performance of proposed algorithms empirically through experimental simulations based on real and synthetic datasets. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithms significantly outperform existing algorithms

Special oils for halal and safe cosmetics

Three types of non conventional oils were extracted, analyzed and tested for toxicity. Date palm kernel oil (DPKO), mango kernel oil (MKO) and Ramputan seed oil (RSO). Oil content for tow cultivars of dates Deglect Noor and Moshkan was 9.67% and 7.30%, respectively. The three varieties of mango were found to contain about 10% oil in average. The red yellow types of Ramputan were found to have 11 and 14% oil, respectively. The phenolic compounds in DPKO, MKO and RSO were 0.98, 0.88 and 0.78 mg/ml Gallic acid equivalent, respectively. Oils were analyzed for their fatty acid composition and they are rich in oleic acid C18:1 and showed the presence of (dodecanoic acid) lauric acid C12:0, which reported to appear some antimicrobial activities. All extracted oils, DPKO, MKO and RSO showed no toxic effect using prime shrimp bioassay. Since these oils are stable, melt at skin temperature, have good lubricity and are great source of essential fatty acids; they could be used as highly moisturizing, cleansing and nourishing oils because of high oleic acid content. They are ideal for use in such halal cosmetics such as Science, Engineering and Technology 75 skin care and massage, hair-care, soap and shampoo products

Traffic and Resource Management in Robust Cloud Data Center Networks

Cloud Computing is becoming the mainstream paradigm, as organizations, both large and small, begin to harness its benefits. Cloud computing gained its success for giving IT exactly what it needed: The ability to grow and shrink computing resources, on the go, in a cost-effective manner, without the anguish of infrastructure design and setup. The ability to adapt computing demands to market fluctuations is just one of the many benefits that cloud computing has to offer, this is why this new paradigm is rising rapidly. According to a Gartner report, the total sales of the various cloud services will be worth 204 billion dollars worldwide in 2016. With this massive growth, the performance of the underlying infrastructure is crucial to its success and sustainability. Currently, cloud computing heavily depends on data centers for its daily business needs. In fact, it is through the virtualization of data centers that the concept of "computing as a utility" emerged. However, data center virtualization is still in its infancy; and there exists a plethora of open research issues and challenges related to data center virtualization, including but not limited to, optimized topologies and protocols, embedding design methods and online algorithms, resource provisioning and allocation, data center energy efficiency, fault tolerance issues and fault tolerant design, improving service availability under failure conditions, enabling network programmability, etc. This dissertation will attempt to elaborate and address key research challenges and problems related to the design and operation of efficient virtualized data centers and data center infrastructure for cloud services. In particular, we investigate the problem of scalable traffic management and traffic engineering methods in data center networks and present a decomposition method to exactly solve the problem with considerable runtime improvement over mathematical-based formulations. To maximize the network's admissibility and increase its revenue, cloud providers must make efficient use of their's network resources. This goal is highly correlated with the employed resource allocation/placement schemes; formally known as the virtual network embedding problem. This thesis looks at multi-facets of this latter problem; in particular, we study the embedding problem for services with one-to-many communication mode; or what we denote as the multicast virtual network embedding problem. Then, we tackle the survivable virtual network embedding problem by proposing a fault-tolerance design that provides guaranteed service continuity in the event of server failure. Furthermore, we consider the embedding problem for elastic services in the event of heterogeneous node failures. Finally, in the effort to enable and support data center network programmability, we study the placement problem of softwarized network functions (e.g., load balancers, firewalls, etc.), formally known as the virtual network function assignment problem. Owing to its combinatorial complexity, we propose a novel decomposition method, and we numerically show that it is hundred times faster than mathematical formulations from recent existing literature

Video streaming over the internet using application layer multicast

Multicast is a very important communication paradigm. However, the deployment of multicast at IP layer is very slow, due to development and deployment issues such as ISPs' lack of incentives to update routers and inter-operability among multicast routing protocols. Application Layer Multicast (ALM) is a good alternative, where participating peers organize themselves into a logical overlay network atop the physical links and data is \tunneled" to each other via unicast links. The distinctive feature between IP multicast and ALM is that in ALM, data replication and forwarding functionalities are performed by participating peers (a.k.a. end systems), rather than the routers in Internet Protocol (IP) multicast. This fundamental difference enables ALM to be able to circumvent the development and deployment issues of IP multicast, by exploiting the resources (e.g., CPU cycles, storage, and access bandwidth) at the edge of the network. Nevertheless, it also raises other challenges, as peers are not as stable as routers since they may join and depart the on-going session at will. In this thesis, we address some of the challenges and they are summarized as follows: First, most current P2P or ALM streaming systems are equipped with a non-scalable membership management algorithm, greatly hindering their applicability to large-scale implementations over the Internet: they either rely on a central entity to handle group membership, or simply assume that all group members are visible to each other and flooding is the main mechanism used to disseminate membership-related updates to all participating group members. This implies that they are only applicable to small groups. Second, one of ALM's prominent features, flexility, has not been fully exploited: moving the multicast functionalities from lower layer (IP layer) to higher layer (Application layer) can greatly facilitate the integration of Quality-of-Service (QoS) support. The end-to-end philosophy states that it is better to leave those functionalities to higher layers because the heterogeneity among users' requirements can be handled much better by end users, rather than the network. However, QoS, and in particular, reliability has not been thoroughly addressed in existing ALM schemes. Third, admission control algorithms are essential to the success of any ALM system, due to the fact that in ALM, each peer acts as both a client as well as a server. On the other hand, the heterogeneity among peers, in terms of their computational power, storage capacity, and access bandwidth, further complicates the design of a good admission control. Several contributions are made to address the aforementioned research challenges, and they are outlined as follows: The first contribution is a devised gossip-based membership management algorithm that is able to collect and disseminate membership-related information under high rate of churn, using relatively low communication overheads. The second contribution is a reliability-centric multicast tree construction algorithm that greatly enhance peers' perceived reliability. The third contribution is a QoS-aware tree construction algorithm that accommodates the heterogeneity among peers, such as access bandwidth, network distance, and reliability. The last contribution is the identification of the admission control problem in this overlay video streaming

An Algorithmic Taxonomy of Production System Machines

This paper presents a survey of computer architectures designed to execute production systems. After a brief description of production systems and production system languages, the paper summarizes match algorithms, particularly the Rete algorithm, and outlines suggested parallelizations. Most parallel production system algorithms have as their unit of sequential computation a single production's left-hand side, activations of a single Rete node, a single activation of a Rete node, or a single comparison in a Rete node. The paper discusses a number of proposed production system machine architectures in terms of the parallel and sequential computations performed in the algorithms suggested for each machine. A taxonomy of parallel production system algorithms, describing in detail the distribution and replication of data and computations, concludes the paper