138,191 research outputs found
A Switch Architecture for Real-Time Multimedia Communications
In this paper we present a switch that can be used to transfer multimedia type of trafJic. The switch provides a guaranteed throughput and a bounded latency. We focus on the design of a prototype Switching Element using the new technology opportunities being offered today. The architecture meets the multimedia requirements but still has a low complexity and needs a minimum amount of hardware. A main item of this paper will be the background of the architectural design decisions made. These include the interconnection topology, buffer organization, routing and scheduling. The implementation of the switching fabric with FPGAs, allows us to experiment with switching mode, routing strategy and scheduling policy in a multimedia environment. The witching elements are interconnected in a Kautz topology. Kautz graphs have interesting properties such as: a small diametec the degree is independent of the network size, the network is fault-tolerant and has a simple routing algorithm
An Expressive Language and Efficient Execution System for Software Agents
Software agents can be used to automate many of the tedious, time-consuming
information processing tasks that humans currently have to complete manually.
However, to do so, agent plans must be capable of representing the myriad of
actions and control flows required to perform those tasks. In addition, since
these tasks can require integrating multiple sources of remote information ?
typically, a slow, I/O-bound process ? it is desirable to make execution as
efficient as possible. To address both of these needs, we present a flexible
software agent plan language and a highly parallel execution system that enable
the efficient execution of expressive agent plans. The plan language allows
complex tasks to be more easily expressed by providing a variety of operators
for flexibly processing the data as well as supporting subplans (for
modularity) and recursion (for indeterminate looping). The executor is based on
a streaming dataflow model of execution to maximize the amount of operator and
data parallelism possible at runtime. We have implemented both the language and
executor in a system called THESEUS. Our results from testing THESEUS show that
streaming dataflow execution can yield significant speedups over both
traditional serial (von Neumann) as well as non-streaming dataflow-style
execution that existing software and robot agent execution systems currently
support. In addition, we show how plans written in the language we present can
represent certain types of subtasks that cannot be accomplished using the
languages supported by network query engines. Finally, we demonstrate that the
increased expressivity of our plan language does not hamper performance;
specifically, we show how data can be integrated from multiple remote sources
just as efficiently using our architecture as is possible with a
state-of-the-art streaming-dataflow network query engine
Large scale probabilistic available bandwidth estimation
The common utilization-based definition of available bandwidth and many of
the existing tools to estimate it suffer from several important weaknesses: i)
most tools report a point estimate of average available bandwidth over a
measurement interval and do not provide a confidence interval; ii) the commonly
adopted models used to relate the available bandwidth metric to the measured
data are invalid in almost all practical scenarios; iii) existing tools do not
scale well and are not suited to the task of multi-path estimation in
large-scale networks; iv) almost all tools use ad-hoc techniques to address
measurement noise; and v) tools do not provide enough flexibility in terms of
accuracy, overhead, latency and reliability to adapt to the requirements of
various applications. In this paper we propose a new definition for available
bandwidth and a novel framework that addresses these issues. We define
probabilistic available bandwidth (PAB) as the largest input rate at which we
can send a traffic flow along a path while achieving, with specified
probability, an output rate that is almost as large as the input rate. PAB is
expressed directly in terms of the measurable output rate and includes
adjustable parameters that allow the user to adapt to different application
requirements. Our probabilistic framework to estimate network-wide
probabilistic available bandwidth is based on packet trains, Bayesian
inference, factor graphs and active sampling. We deploy our tool on the
PlanetLab network and our results show that we can obtain accurate estimates
with a much smaller measurement overhead compared to existing approaches.Comment: Submitted to Computer Network
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