Content addressable memory project

A parameterized version of the tree processor was designed and tested (by simulation). The leaf processor design is 90 percent complete. We expect to complete and test a combination of tree and leaf cell designs in the next period. Work is proceeding on algorithms for the computer aided manufacturing (CAM), and once the design is complete we will begin simulating algorithms for large problems. The following topics are covered: (1) the practical implementation of content addressable memory; (2) design of a LEAF cell for the Rutgers CAM architecture; (3) a circuit design tool user's manual; and (4) design and analysis of efficient hierarchical interconnection networks

Node Cluster Stability in Vehicular Ad hoc Networks

In recent years, efforts have been made to deploy communication capabilities in vehicles and the transport infrastructure, leading to a potential of vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs). In the envisioned VANET, communications among vehicles will enhance the intelligent transportation systems (ITS) and support not only public-safety applications, but also a wide range of infotainment applications. Urban roads and highways are highly susceptible to a large number of vehicles and traffic jams. Therefore, the networking protocols for VANETs should be scalable to support such large sized networks. Node clustering (i.e., organizing the network into smaller groups of nodes) is a potential approach to improve the scalability of networking protocols for VANETs. However, high relative vehicle mobility and frequent network topology changes inflict new challenges on maintaining stable clusters. The communication links between network nodes play an essential role in determining the VANET topology. This thesis presents a stochastic microscopic vehicle mobility model to capture the time variations of the distance between two consecutive vehicles on a highway. The proposed mobility model is used to characterize the length and the duration of a communication link connecting two nodes in the network for different vehicular traffic flow conditions. Vehicle trajectory data from real and simulated highways are used for performance evaluation. In a highly dynamic VANET, vehicles join and leave clusters along their travel route, resulting in changes in cluster structure. This thesis investigates the impact of vehicle mobility on node cluster stability. A lumped stochastic model is proposed to describe the temporal variations of a system of intervehicle distances, where each intervehicle distance is represented by the proposed microscopic mobility model. Two metrics are used to measure cluster stability: the time period of invariant cluster-overlap state between two neighboring clusters as a measure of external cluster stability, and the time period of invariant cluster-membership as a measure of internal cluster stability. Using the proposed lumped stochastic model, the two cluster stability metrics are probabilistically characterized for different vehicular traffic flow conditions. Additionally, the limiting behavior of a system of two neighboring clusters is modeled, and the steady-state number of common/unclustered nodes between two clusters is approximately derived. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first mathematical characterization of node cluster stability which takes account of the effect of microscopic vehicle mobility. In addition to the impact of vehicle mobility on node cluster stability, the notion of cluster stability is also related to the network protocol requirements. This thesis explores the effect of cluster characteristics (cluster size and cluster-overlap) on minimizing the generic routing overhead. Furthermore, using the derived cluster stability metrics, the impact of cluster instability on intra- and inter- cluster routing overhead is investigated. The proposed vehicle mobility model is a useful tool for mathematically analyzing the impact of mobility and node density on the performance of network protocols in VANETs. The node cluster stability analysis and the proposed the external and internal cluster stability metrics provide a useful tool for the development of efficient clustering algorithms for VANETs

Parallel discrete event simulation: A shared memory approach

With traditional event list techniques, evaluating a detailed discrete event simulation model can often require hours or even days of computation time. Parallel simulation mimics the interacting servers and queues of a real system by assigning each simulated entity to a processor. By eliminating the event list and maintaining only sufficient synchronization to insure causality, parallel simulation can potentially provide speedups that are linear in the number of processors. A set of shared memory experiments is presented using the Chandy-Misra distributed simulation algorithm to simulate networks of queues. Parameters include queueing network topology and routing probabilities, number of processors, and assignment of network nodes to processors. These experiments show that Chandy-Misra distributed simulation is a questionable alternative to sequential simulation of most queueing network models

Smart Algorithms for Hierarchical Clustering in Optical Network

Network design process is a very important in order to balance between the investment in the network and the supervises offered to the network user, taking into consideration, both minimizing the network investment cost, on the other hand, maximizing the quality of service offered to the customers as well.Partitioning the network to smaller sub-networks called clusters is required during the design process inorder to ease studying the whole network and achieve the design process as a trade-off between several atrtributes such as quality of service, reliability,cost, and management. Under CANON, a large scale optical network is partitioned into a number of geographically limited areas taking into account many different criteria like administrative domains, topological characteristics, traffic patterns, legacy infrastructure etc. An important consideration is that each of these clusters is comprised of a group of nodes in geographical proximity. The clusters can coincide with administrative domains but there could be many cases where two or more clusters belong to the same administrative domain. Therefore, in the most general case the partitioning into specific clusters can be either a off-line or a on-line process. In this work only the off-line case is considered. In this Study, we look at the problem of designing efficient 2- level Hierarchical Optical Networks (HON), in the context of network costs optimization. 2-level HON paradigm only have local rings to connect disjoint sets of nodes and a global sub mesh to interconnect all the local rings. We present an Hierarchical algorithm that is based on two phases. We present results for scenarios containing a set of real optical topologies

Cluster based jamming and countermeasures for wireless sensor network MAC protocols

A wireless sensor network (WSN) is a collection of wireless nodes, usually with limited computing resources and available energy. The medium access control layer (MAC layer) directly guides the radio hardware and manages access to the radio spectrum in controlled way. A top priority for a WSN MAC protocol is to conserve energy, however tailoring the algorithm for this purpose can create or expose a number of security vulnerabilities. In particular, a regular duty cycle makes a node vulnerable to periodic jamming attacks. This vulnerability limits the use of use of a WSN in applications requiring high levels of security. We present a new WSN MAC protocol, RSMAC (Random Sleep MAC) that is designed to provide resistance to periodic jamming attacks while maintaining elements that are essential to WSN functionality. CPU, memory and especially radio usage are kept to a minimum to conserve energy while maintaining an acceptable level of network performance so that applications can be run transparently on top of the secure MAC layer. We use a coordinated yet pseudo-random duty cycle that is loosely synchronized across the entire network via a distributed algorithm. This thwarts an attacker\u27s ability to predict when nodes will be awake and likewise thwarts energy efficient intelligent jamming attacks by reducing their effectiveness and energy-efficiency to that of non-intelligent attacks. Implementing the random duty cycle requires additional energy usage, but also offers an opportunity to reduce asymmetric energy use and eliminate energy use lost to explicit neighbor discovery. We perform testing of RSMAC against non-secure protocols in a novel simulator that we designed to make prototyping new WSN algorithms efficient, informative and consistent. First we perform tests of the existing SMAC protocol to demonstrate the relevance of the novel simulation for estimating energy usage, data transmission rates, MAC timing and other relevant macro characteristics of wireless sensor networks. Second, we use the simulation to perform detailed testing of RSMAC that demonstrates its performance characteristics with different configurations and its effectiveness in confounding intelligent jammers

Joint transceiver design and power optimization for wireless sensor networks in underground mines

Avec les grands développements des technologies de communication sans fil, les réseaux de capteurs sans fil (WSN) ont attiré beaucoup d’attention dans le monde entier au cours de la dernière décennie. Les réseaux de capteurs sans fil sont maintenant utilisés pour a surveillance sanitaire, la gestion des catastrophes, la défense, les télécommunications, etc. De tels réseaux sont utilisés dans de nombreuses applications industrielles et commerciales comme la surveillance des processus industriels et de l’environnement, etc. Un réseau WSN est une collection de transducteurs spécialisés connus sous le nom de noeuds de capteurs avec une liaison de communication distribuée de manière aléatoire dans tous les emplacements pour surveiller les paramètres. Chaque noeud de capteur est équipé d’un transducteur, d’un processeur de signal, d’une unité d’alimentation et d’un émetteur-récepteur. Les WSN sont maintenant largement utilisés dans l’industrie minière souterraine pour surveiller certains paramètres environnementaux, comme la quantité de gaz, d’eau, la température, l’humidité, le niveau d’oxygène, de poussière, etc. Dans le cas de la surveillance de l’environnement, un WSN peut être remplacé de manière équivalente par un réseau à relais à entrées et sorties multiples (MIMO). Les réseaux de relais multisauts ont attiré un intérêt de recherche important ces derniers temps grâce à leur capacité à augmenter la portée de la couverture. La liaison de communication réseau d’une source vers une destination est mise en oeuvre en utilisant un schéma d’amplification/transmission (AF) ou de décodage/transfert (DF). Le relais AF reçoit des informations du relais précédent et amplifie simplement le signal reçu, puis il le transmet au relais suivant. D’autre part, le relais DF décode d’abord le signal reçu, puis il le transmet au relais suivant au deuxième étage s’il peut parfaitement décoder le signal entrant. En raison de la simplicité analytique, dans cette thèse, nous considérons le schéma de relais AF et les résultats de ce travail peuvent également être développés pour le relais DF. La conception d’un émetteur/récepteur pour le relais MIMO multisauts est très difficile. Car à l’étape de relais L, il y a 2L canaux possibles. Donc, pour un réseau à grande échelle, il n’est pas économique d’envoyer un signal par tous les liens possibles. Au lieu de cela, nous pouvons trouver le meilleur chemin de la source à la destination qui donne le rapport signal sur bruit (SNR) de bout en bout le plus élevé. Nous pouvons minimiser la fonction objectif d’erreur quadratique moyenne (MSE) ou de taux d’erreur binaire (BER) en envoyant le signal utilisant le chemin sélectionné. L’ensemble de relais dans le chemin reste actif et le reste des relais s’éteint, ce qui permet d’économiser de l’énergie afin d’améliorer la durée de vie du réseau. Le meilleur chemin de transmission de signal a été étudié dans la littérature pour un relais MIMO à deux bonds mais est plus complexe pour un ...With the great developments in wireless communication technologies, Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) have gained attention worldwide in the past decade and are now being used in health monitoring, disaster management, defense, telecommunications, etc. Such networks are used in many industrial and consumer applications such as industrial process and environment monitoring, among others. A WSN network is a collection of specialized transducers known as sensor nodes with a communication link distributed randomly in any locations to monitor environmental parameters such as water level, and temperature. Each sensor node is equipped with a transducer, a signal processor, a power unit, and a transceiver. WSNs are now being widely used in the underground mining industry to monitor environmental parameters, including the amount of gas, water, temperature, humidity, oxygen level, dust, etc. The WSN for environment monitoring can be equivalently replaced by a multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) relay network. Multi-hop relay networks have attracted significant research interest in recent years for their capability in increasing the coverage range. The network communication link from a source to a destination is implemented using the amplify-and-forward (AF) or decode-and-forward (DF) schemes. The AF relay receives information from the previous relay and simply amplifies the received signal and then forwards it to the next relay. On the other hand, the DF relay first decodes the received signal and then forwards it to the next relay in the second stage if it can perfectly decode the incoming signal. For analytical simplicity, in this thesis, we consider the AF relaying scheme and the results of this work can also be developed for the DF relay. The transceiver design for multi-hop MIMO relay is very challenging. This is because at the L-th relay stage, there are 2L possible channels. So, for a large scale network, it is not economical to send the signal through all possible links. Instead, we can find the best path from source-to-destination that gives the highest end-to-end signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). We can minimize the mean square error (MSE) or bit error rate (BER) objective function by sending the signal using the selected path. The set of relay in the path remains active and the rest of the relays are turned off which can save power to enhance network life-time. The best path signal transmission has been carried out in the literature for 2-hop MIMO relay and for multiple relaying it becomes very complex. In the first part of this thesis, we propose an optimal best path finding algorithm at perfect channel state information (CSI). We consider a parallel multi-hop multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) AF relay system where a linear minimum mean-squared error (MMSE) receiver is used at the destination. We simplify the parallel network into equivalent series multi-hop MIMO relay link using best relaying, where the best relay ..

Distributive Join Strategy Based on Tuple Inversion

In this paper, we propose a new direction for distributive join operations. We assume that there will be a scalable distributed computer system in which many computers (processors) are connected through a communication network that can be in a LAN or as part of the Internet with sufficient bandwidth. A relational database is then distributed across this network of processors. However, in our approach, the distribution of the database is very fine-grained and is based on the Distributed Hash Table (DHT) concept. A tuple of a table is assigned to a specific processor by using a fair hash function applied to its key value. For each joinable attribute, an inverted file list is further generated and distributed again based on the DHT. This pre-distribution is done when the tuple enters the system and therefore does not require any distribution of data tuples on the fly when the join is executed. When a join operation request is broadcast, each processor performs a local join and the results are sent back to a query processor which, in turn, merges the join results and returns them to the user. Note that the distribution of the DHT of the inverted file lists can be either pre-processed or distributed on the fly. If the lists are pre-processed and distributed, they have to be maintained. We evaluate our approach by comparing it empirically to two other approaches: the naive join method and the fully distributed join method. The results show a significantly higher performance of our method for a wide range of possible parameter

Fast thread communication and synchronization mechanisms for a scalable single chip multiprocessor

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 1998.Includes bibliographical references (p. 159-163).by Stephen William Keckler.Ph.D