Evaluating Delayed Write in a Multilevel Caching File System

Delayed write in a multilevel file system cache hierarchy offers a way to improve performance in diverse client/server scenarios, such as integrating mass store into a distributed file system or providing distributed file system access over low-speed links. Using file system traces and cache simulations, we explore extensions and modifications to the traditional client caching model employed in such file systems as AFS, Sprite, and DFS. High cache hit rates at an intermediate cache server—a machine logically interposed between clients and servers that provides cached file service to the clients—combined with high client cache hit rates lend practicality to an integrated mass storage file system. In such a system, magnetic tape or optical-based mass storage devices may be used as a first-class data repository, fronted by disk and RAM caches to offer acceptable access times to the large, but slow, mass storage system. Similarly, a high cache hit rate is necessary for users accessing file systems via low-speed links, where a delayed write intermediate caching server can mediate traffic to make better use of available bandwidth. In an example taken from mobile computing, an intermediate server might be used as a docking station at a user's home. This arrangement would be convenient for users of mobile computers who upload large amounts of data generated while operating in disconnected mode. Simulations of delayed write caching strategies are applicable to both the mass storage and low-speed link scenarios.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/107940/1/citi-tr-95-9.pd

Mobile Open Systems Technologies For The Utilities Industries

This chapter considers the provision of mobile computing support for field engineers in the electricity industry. Section 11.2 describes field engineers current working practices and from these derives a set of general requirements for a mobile computing environment to support utilities workers. A key requirement which is identified is the need for field engineers to access real-time multimedia information in the field and it is on this requirement that the remainder of the chapter focuses. Sections 11.3 and 11.4 present a survey of enabling technologies to support distributed systems operating in both local and wide area wireless environments. The impact of these technologies on the provision of mobile computing support is assessed in section 11.5. Section 11.6 describes a software architecture which attempts to address the requirements highlighted in section 11.2 and in particular is designed to support real-time access to data in the field. Finally, section 11.7 considers the degree to which utilities workers requirements can be met by the surveyed technologies and considers the likely impact of remote data access on field engineers working practices

Application acceleration for wireless and mobile data networks

This work studies application acceleration for wireless and mobile data networks. The problem of accelerating application can be addressed along multiple dimensions. The first dimension is advanced network protocol design, i.e., optimizing underlying network protocols, particulary transport layer protocol and link layer protocol. Despite advanced network protocol design, in this work we observe that certain application behaviors can fundamentally limit the performance achievable when operating over wireless and mobile data networks. The performance difference is caused by the complex application behaviors of these non-FTP applications. Explicitly dealing with application behaviors can improve application performance for new environments. Along this overcoming application behavior dimension, we accelerate applications by studying specific types of applications including Client-server, Peer-to-peer and Location-based applications. In exploring along this dimension, we identify a set of application behaviors that significantly affect application performance. To accommodate these application behaviors, we firstly extract general design principles that can apply to any applications whenever possible. These design principles can also be integrated into new application designs. We also consider specific applications by applying these design principles and build prototypes to demonstrate the effectiveness of the solutions. In the context of application acceleration, even though all the challenges belong to the two aforementioned dimensions of advanced network protocol design and overcoming application behavior are addressed, application performance can still be limited by the underlying network capability, particularly physical bandwidth. In this work, we study the possibility of speeding up data delivery by eliminating traffic redundancy present in application traffics. Specifically, we first study the traffic redundancy along multiple dimensions using traces obtained from multiple real wireless network deployments. Based on the insights obtained from the analysis, we propose Wireless Memory (WM), a two-ended AP-client solution to effectively exploit traffic redundancy in wireless and mobile environments. Application acceleration can be achieved along two other dimensions: network provision ing and quality of service (QoS). Network provisioning allocates network resources such as physical bandwidth or wireless spectrum, while QoS provides different priority to different applications, users, or data flows. These two dimensions have their respective limitations in the context of application acceleration. In this work, we focus on the two dimensions of overcoming application behavior and Eliminating traffic redundancy to improve application performance. The contribution of this work is as follows. First, we study the problem of application acceleration for wireless and mobile data networks, and we characterize the dimensions along which to address the problem. Second, we identify that application behaviors can significantly affect application performance, and we propose a set of design principles to deal with the behaviors. We also build prototypes to conduct system research. Third, we consider traffic redundancy elimination and propose a wireless memory approach.Ph.D.Committee Chair: Sivakumar, Raghupathy; Committee Member: Ammar, Mostafa; Committee Member: Fekri, Faramarz; Committee Member: Ji, Chuanyi; Committee Member: Ramachandran, Umakishor

Contributions aux systèmes répartis en environnements ubiquitaires : adaptation, sensibilité au contexte et tolérance aux fautes

D'années en années, nous observons l'arrivée sur le marche d'ordinateurs personnels de plus en plus petits pour des utilisateurs de plus en plus nombreux, ainsi des assistants personnels numériques et des objets dits connectés, en passant par les téléphones mobiles. Tous ces dispositifs tendent à être interchangeables du point de vue des ressources en mémoire, en calcul et en connectivité : par exemple, les téléphones mobiles sont devenus des équipements informatiques de moins en moins spécialisés ou de plus en plus universels et font dorénavant office en la matière de portails d'accès aux capteurs présents dans l'environnement immédiat de l'utilisateur. L'enjeu abordé dans nos travaux est la construction de systèmes répartis incluant ces nouveaux dispositifs matériels. L'objectif de mes recherches est la conception des paradigmes d'intermédiation génériques sous-jacents aux applications réparties de plus en plus ubiquitaires. Plus particulièrement, la problématique générale de mes travaux est la définition du rôle des intergiciels dans l'intégration des dispositifs mobiles et des objets connectés dans les architectures logicielles réparties. Ces architectures logicielles reposaient très majoritairement sur des infrastructures logicielles fixes au début des travaux présentés dans ce manuscrit. Dans ce manuscrit, je décris mes travaux sur trois sujets : 1) l'adaptation des applications réparties pour la continuité de service pendant les déconnexions, 2) la gestion des informations du contexte d'exécution des applications réparties pour leur sensibilité au contexte, et 3) les mécanismes de détection des entraves dans les environnements fortement dynamiques tels que ceux construits avec des réseaux mobiles spontanés. Sur le premier sujet, nous fournissons une couche intergicielle générique pour la gestion des aspects répartis de la gestion des déconnexions en utilisant une stratégie d'adaptation collaborative dans les architectures à base d'objets et de composants. Sur le deuxième sujet, nous étudions les paradigmes architecturaux pour la construction d'un service de gestion de contexte générique, afin d'adresser la diversité des traitements (fusion et agrégation, corrélation, détection de situation par apprentissage, etc.), puis nous adressons le problème de la distribution des informations de contexte aux différentes échelles de l'Internet des objets. Enfin, sur le troisième sujet, nous commençons par la détection des modes de fonctionnement pour l'adaptation aux déconnexions afin de faire la différence, lorsque cela est possible, entre une déconnexion et une défaillance, et ensuite nous spécifions et construisons un service de gestion de groupe partitionnable. Ce service est assez fort pour interdire la construction de partitions ne correspondant pas à la réalité de l'environnement à un instant donné et est assez faible pour être mis en oeuvre algorithmiquemen

Analysis of priority-based packet schedulers for proportional delay diferentiation

Master'sMASTER OF ENGINEERIN

User-activity aware strategies for mobile information access

Information access suffers tremendously in wireless networks because of the low correlation between content transferred across low-bandwidth wireless links and actual data used to serve user requests. As a result, conventional content access mechanisms face such problems as unnecessary bandwidth consumption and large response times, and users experience significant performance degradation. In this dissertation, we analyze the cause of those problems and find that the major reason for inefficient information access in wireless networks is the absence of any user-activity awareness in current mechanisms. To solve these problems, we propose three user-activity aware strategies for mobile information access. Through simulations and implementations, we show that our strategies can outperform conventional information access schemes in terms of bandwidth consumption and user-perceived response times.Ph.D.Committee Chair: Raghupathy Sivakumar; Committee Member: Chuanyi Ji; Committee Member: George Riley; Committee Member: Magnus Egerstedt; Committee Member: Umakishore Ramachandra

Issues in building mobile-aware applications with the Rover Toolkit

Thesis (M.S.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 1996.Includes bibliographical references (p. 69-73).by Joshua A. Tauber.M.S

Um sistema de transações adaptavel para o ambiente de comunicação sem fio

Orientador: Maria Beatriz Felgar de ToledoDissertação (mestrado) - Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Instituto de ComputaçãoResumo: Recentes avanços nas tecnologias de telecomunicação e de dispositivos de computação portáteis possibilitaram o surgimento da Computação Móvel. Assim, dispositivos como laptops e PDA¿s equipados com interfaces de comunicação sem fio ganharam a capacidade de participar de computações distribuídas mesmo estando em movimento ou desconectados. Apesar da computação móvel ser muito atraente, ela impõe uma série de obstáculos aos sistemas distribuídos. Dentre estes obstáculos está a baixa largura de banda das redes de comunicação sem fio, desconexões inesperadas e escassez de recursos do dispositivo de computação móvel (como energia e espaço em disco). Diante deste contexto, esta dissertação apresenta um sistema de transações que possui a capacidade de adaptação diante dos obstáculos impostos pelo ambiente de comunicação sem fio. Esta adaptação é obtida através da colaboração entre as transações e um sistema de apoio. O sistema de apoio é responsável pelo monitoramento dos recursos do ambiente, por notificar as transações sobre as mudanças ocorridas no ambiente e por prover mecanismos de adaptação às transações. Cada transação pode reagir às mudanças ocorridas no ambiente de acordo com a sua política de adaptação. Basicamente, os mecanismos de adaptação providos pelo sistema são os modos de operação e os níveis de isolamento. Para a validação do modelo proposto, esta dissertação apresenta também um protótipo que foi implementado usando as tecnologias Java e CORBAAbstract: Recent advances in telecommunication technologies and portable computing devices have made possible the appearance of Mobile Computing. Thus devices like laptops and PDAs equipped with wireless communication interfaces have acquired the capacity to participate in distributed computing while moving or disconnected. Although attractive, mobile computing imposes a set of obstacles to distributed computing. Among these obstacles is the low bandwidth of the wireless communication networks, unexpected disconnections, and lacking of resources in mobile computing devices (such as power and disk space). In this context, this dissertation presents a transaction system that can adapt in the face of the obstacles imposed by the wireless communication environment. This adaptation is acquired through the collaboration between transactions and the underlying system. The underlying system is responsible for monitoring of resources, notifying transactions about changes in the environment and providing adaptation mechanisms. Each transaction may react to environmental changes according to its own adaptation policy. The provided adaptation mechanisms are operation modes and isolation levels. Moreover, this dissertation presents a prototype developed for the validation of the proposed model. The prototype was implemented using Java and CORBA technologiesMestradoCiência da ComputaçãoMestre em Ciência da Computaçã