Optimal Termination Protocols for Network Partitioning

We address the problem of maintaining the distributed database consistency in presence of failures while maximizing the database availability. Network partitioning is a failure which partitions the distributed system into a number of parts, no part being able to communicate with any other. Formalizations of various notions in this context are developed and two measures for the performances of protocols in presence of a network partitioning are introduced. A general optimality theory is developed for two classes of protocols - centralized and decentralized. Optimal protocols are produced in all cases.published_or_final_versio

Distributed Broadcasting and Mapping Protocols in Directed Anonymous Networks

We initiate the study of distributed protocols over directed anonymous networks that are not necessarily strongly connected. In such networks, nodes are aware only of their incoming and outgoing edges, have no unique identity, and have no knowledge of the network topology or even bounds on its parameters, like the number of nodes or the network diameter. Anonymous networks are of interest in various settings such as wireless ad-hoc networks and peer to peer networks. Our goal is to create distributed protocols that reduce the uncertainty by distributing the knowledge of the network topology to all the nodes. We consider two basic protocols: broadcasting and unique label assignment. These two protocols enable a complete mapping of the network and can serve as key building blocks in more advanced protocols. We develop distributed asynchronous protocols as well as derive lower bounds on their communication complexity, total bandwidth complexity, and node label complexity. The resulting lower bounds are sometimes surprisingly high, exhibiting the complexity of topology extraction in directed anonymous networks

Fast Distributed Algorithms for LP-Type Problems of Bounded Dimension

In this paper we present various distributed algorithms for LP-type problems in the well-known gossip model. LP-type problems include many important classes of problems such as (integer) linear programming, geometric problems like smallest enclosing ball and polytope distance, and set problems like hitting set and set cover. In the gossip model, a node can only push information to or pull information from nodes chosen uniformly at random. Protocols for the gossip model are usually very practical due to their fast convergence, their simplicity, and their stability under stress and disruptions. Our algorithms are very efficient (logarithmic rounds or better with just polylogarithmic communication work per node per round) whenever the combinatorial dimension of the given LP-type problem is constant, even if the size of the given LP-type problem is polynomially large in the number of nodes

Multimodal estimation of distribution algorithms

Taking the advantage of estimation of distribution algorithms (EDAs) in preserving high diversity, this paper proposes a multimodal EDA. Integrated with clustering strategies for crowding and speciation, two versions of this algorithm are developed, which operate at the niche level. Then these two algorithms are equipped with three distinctive techniques: 1) a dynamic cluster sizing strategy; 2) an alternative utilization of Gaussian and Cauchy distributions to generate offspring; and 3) an adaptive local search. The dynamic cluster sizing affords a potential balance between exploration and exploitation and reduces the sensitivity to the cluster size in the niching methods. Taking advantages of Gaussian and Cauchy distributions, we generate the offspring at the niche level through alternatively using these two distributions. Such utilization can also potentially offer a balance between exploration and exploitation. Further, solution accuracy is enhanced through a new local search scheme probabilistically conducted around seeds of niches with probabilities determined self-adaptively according to fitness values of these seeds. Extensive experiments conducted on 20 benchmark multimodal problems confirm that both algorithms can achieve competitive performance compared with several state-of-the-art multimodal algorithms, which is supported by nonparametric tests. Especially, the proposed algorithms are very promising for complex problems with many local optima

Two generalizations of Kohonen clustering

The relationship between the sequential hard c-means (SHCM), learning vector quantization (LVQ), and fuzzy c-means (FCM) clustering algorithms is discussed. LVQ and SHCM suffer from several major problems. For example, they depend heavily on initialization. If the initial values of the cluster centers are outside the convex hull of the input data, such algorithms, even if they terminate, may not produce meaningful results in terms of prototypes for cluster representation. This is due in part to the fact that they update only the winning prototype for every input vector. The impact and interaction of these two families with Kohonen's self-organizing feature mapping (SOFM), which is not a clustering method, but which often leads ideas to clustering algorithms is discussed. Then two generalizations of LVQ that are explicitly designed as clustering algorithms are presented; these algorithms are referred to as generalized LVQ = GLVQ; and fuzzy LVQ = FLVQ. Learning rules are derived to optimize an objective function whose goal is to produce 'good clusters'. GLVQ/FLVQ (may) update every node in the clustering net for each input vector. Neither GLVQ nor FLVQ depends upon a choice for the update neighborhood or learning rate distribution - these are taken care of automatically. Segmentation of a gray tone image is used as a typical application of these algorithms to illustrate the performance of GLVQ/FLVQ