Understanding collaboration in volunteer computing systems

Volunteer computing is a paradigm in which devices participating in a distributed environment share part of their resources to help others perform their activities. The effectiveness of this computing paradigm depends on the collaboration attitude adopted by the participating devices. Unfortunately for software designers it is not clear how to contribute with local resources to the shared environment without compromising resources that could then be required by the contributors. Therefore, many designers adopt a conservative position when defining the collaboration strategy to be embedded in volunteer computing applications. This position produces an underutilization of the devices’ local resources and reduces the effectiveness of these solutions. This article presents a study that helps designers understand the impact of adopting a particular collaboration attitude to contribute with local resources to the distributed shared environment. The study considers five collaboration strategies, which are analyzed in computing environments with both, abundance and scarcity of resources. The obtained results indicate that collaboration strategies based on effort-based incentives work better than those using contribution-based incentives. These results also show that the use of effort-based incentives does not jeopardize the availability of local resources for the local needs.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

Simulator Development - Annual Report Year 3

This document describes the progress of the simulator development with in the third year of the CATNETS project. The refinement of the simulator as well as a detailed guide to conducting simulations is presented. --Grid Computing

Enhanced Cluster Computing Performance Through Proportional Fairness

The performance of cluster computing depends on how concurrent jobs share multiple data center resource types like CPU, RAM and disk storage. Recent research has discussed efficiency and fairness requirements and identified a number of desirable scheduling objectives including so-called dominant resource fairness (DRF). We argue here that proportional fairness (PF), long recognized as a desirable objective in sharing network bandwidth between ongoing flows, is preferable to DRF. The superiority of PF is manifest under the realistic modelling assumption that the population of jobs in progress is a stochastic process. In random traffic the strategy-proof property of DRF proves unimportant while PF is shown by analysis and simulation to offer a significantly better efficiency-fairness tradeoff.Comment: Submitted to Performance 201

Controlled Matching Game for Resource Allocation and User Association in WLANs

In multi-rate IEEE 802.11 WLANs, the traditional user association based on the strongest received signal and the well known anomaly of the MAC protocol can lead to overloaded Access Points (APs), and poor or heterogeneous performance. Our goal is to propose an alternative game-theoretic approach for association. We model the joint resource allocation and user association as a matching game with complementarities and peer effects consisting of selfish players solely interested in their individual throughputs. Using recent game-theoretic results we first show that various resource sharing protocols actually fall in the scope of the set of stability-inducing resource allocation schemes. The game makes an extensive use of the Nash bargaining and some of its related properties that allow to control the incentives of the players. We show that the proposed mechanism can greatly improve the efficiency of 802.11 with heterogeneous nodes and reduce the negative impact of peer effects such as its MAC anomaly. The mechanism can be implemented as a virtual connectivity management layer to achieve efficient APs-user associations without modification of the MAC layer