Small-World File-Sharing Communities

Web caches, content distribution networks, peer-to-peer file sharing networks, distributed file systems, and data grids all have in common that they involve a community of users who generate requests for shared data. In each case, overall system performance can be improved significantly if we can first identify and then exploit interesting structure within a community's access patterns. To this end, we propose a novel perspective on file sharing based on the study of the relationships that form among users based on the files in which they are interested. We propose a new structure that captures common user interests in data--the data-sharing graph-- and justify its utility with studies on three data-distribution systems: a high-energy physics collaboration, the Web, and the Kazaa peer-to-peer network. We find small-world patterns in the data-sharing graphs of all three communities. We analyze these graphs and propose some probable causes for these emergent small-world patterns. The significance of small-world patterns is twofold: it provides a rigorous support to intuition and, perhaps most importantly, it suggests ways to design mechanisms that exploit these naturally emerging patterns

A universal approach to coverage probability and throughput analysis for cellular networks

This paper proposes a novel tractable approach for accurately analyzing both the coverage probability and the achievable throughput of cellular networks. Specifically, we derive a new procedure referred to as the equivalent uniformdensity plane-entity (EUDPE)method for evaluating the other-cell interference. Furthermore, we demonstrate that our EUDPE method provides a universal and effective means to carry out the lower bound analysis of both the coverage probability and the average throughput for various base-station distribution models that can be found in practice, including the stochastic Poisson point process (PPP) model, a uniformly and randomly distributed model, and a deterministic grid-based model. The lower bounds of coverage probability and average throughput calculated by our proposed method agree with the simulated coverage probability and average throughput results and those obtained by the existing PPP-based analysis, if not better. Moreover, based on our new definition of cell edge boundary, we show that the cellular topology with randomly distributed base stations (BSs) only tends toward the Voronoi tessellation when the path-loss exponent is sufficiently high, which reveals the limitation of this popular network topology

Bottleneck Routing Games with Low Price of Anarchy

We study {\em bottleneck routing games} where the social cost is determined by the worst congestion on any edge in the network. In the literature, bottleneck games assume player utility costs determined by the worst congested edge in their paths. However, the Nash equilibria of such games are inefficient since the price of anarchy can be very high and proportional to the size of the network. In order to obtain smaller price of anarchy we introduce {\em exponential bottleneck games} where the utility costs of the players are exponential functions of their congestions. We find that exponential bottleneck games are very efficient and give a poly-log bound on the price of anarchy: $O(\log L \cdot \log |E|)$, where $L$ is the largest path length in the players' strategy sets and $E$ is the set of edges in the graph. By adjusting the exponential utility costs with a logarithm we obtain games whose player costs are almost identical to those in regular bottleneck games, and at the same time have the good price of anarchy of exponential games.Comment: 12 page