Efficient Broadcast Disks Program Construction in Asymmetric Communication Environments

ABSTRACT A well-known technique for broadcast program construction is the Broadcast Disks. However, it has important disadvantages, as for example that the broadcast program construction procedure leaves some parts of the broadcast program empty. This paper proposes a new approach for the construction of the broadcast program. Specifically, it presents three new algorithms, which face the problems of the Broadcast Disk Technique. According to our approach, the broadcast program is constructed with the minimum possible length, respecting the selected disk relative frequencies and keeps the average delays of retrieving data-items low. The constructed broadcast programs have no empty parts and retain their desired properties in any combination of disk relative frequencies. Experimental results show that this approach is more efficient than Broadcast Disks in all cases

Broadcast Scheduling for Push Broadcast Systems with Arbitrary Cost Functions

In this report the problem of broadcast scheduling in Push broadcast systems is studied. We introduce an optimization approach that leads to well justified policies for Push broadcast systems with generalized cost functions. In particular, we apply our results to a Push broadcast system with different deadlines associated to the files while allowing the files to have unequal demand rates and lengths. We will show that our proposed policy covers some of the previously investigated Push systems as special cases and is applicable to a wide range of cost functions assigned to the files. We also calculate the optimal average cost for our experimental settings and show, through extensive simulation studies, that our results closely match that value for each experiment

Anti-Jamming Schedules for Wireless Broadcast Systems

Modern society is heavily dependent on wireless networks for providing voice and data communications. Wireless data broadcast has recently emerged as an attractive way to disseminate data to a large number of clients. In data broadcast systems, the server proactively transmits the information on a downlink channel; the clients access the data by listening to the channel. Wireless data broadcast systems can serve a large number of heterogeneous clients, minimizing power consumption as well as protecting the privacy of the clients' locations. The availability and relatively low cost of antennas resulted in a number of potential threats to the integrity of the wireless infrastructure. The existing solutions and schedules for wireless data broadcast are vulnerable to jamming, i.e., the use of active signals to prevent data distribution. The goal of jammers is to disrupt the normal operation of the broadcast system, which results in high waiting time and excessive power consumption for the clients. In this paper we investigate efficient schedules for wireless data broadcast that perform well in the presence of a jammer. We show that the waiting time of client can be efficiently reduced by adding redundancy to the schedule. The main challenge in the design of redundant broadcast schedules is to ensure that the transmitted information is always up-to-date. Accordingly, we present schedules that guarantee low waiting time and low staleness of data in the presence of a jammer. We prove that our schedules are optimal if the jamming signal has certain energy limitations

Scalable download protocols

Scalable on-demand content delivery systems, designed to effectively handle increasing request rates, typically use service aggregation or content replication techniques. Service aggregation relies on one-to-many communication techniques, such as multicast, to efficiently deliver content from a single sender to multiple receivers. With replication, multiple geographically distributed replicas of the service or content share the load of processing client requests and enable delivery from a nearby server.Previous scalable protocols for downloading large, popular files from a single server include batching and cyclic multicast. Analytic lower bounds developed in this thesis show that neither of these protocols consistently yields performance close to optimal. New hybrid protocols are proposed that achieve within 20% of the optimal delay in homogeneous systems, as well as within 25% of the optimal maximum client delay in all heterogeneous scenarios considered.In systems utilizing both service aggregation and replication, well-designed policies determining which replica serves each request must balance the objectives of achieving high locality of service, and high efficiency of service aggregation. By comparing classes of policies, using both analysis and simulations, this thesis shows that there are significant performance advantages in using current system state information (rather than only proximities and average loads) and in deferring selection decisions when possible. Most of these performance gains can be achieved using only “local” (rather than global) request information.Finally, this thesis proposes adaptations of already proposed peer-assisted download techniques to support a streaming (rather than download) service, enabling playback to begin well before the entire media file is received. These protocols split each file into pieces, which can be downloaded from multiple sources, including other clients downloading the same file. Using simulations, a candidate protocol is presented and evaluated. The protocol includes both a piece selection technique that effectively mediates the conflict between achieving high piece diversity and the in-order requirements of media file playback, as well as a simple on-line rule for deciding when playback can safely commence