119,903 research outputs found
The distributed p-median problem in computer networks
The exponential growth of the Internet over the last decades has led to a significant evolution of the network services and applications. One of the challenges is to provide better
services scalability by placing service replica in appropriate network locations.
Finding the optimal solution to the facility location problem is particularly complex and
is not feasible for large scale systems. Locating facilities in near-optimal locations have been
extensively studied in many works and for different application domains. This work investigates one of the most notable problems in facility location, i.e. the p-median problem, which
locates p facilities with a minimum overall communication cost. All previous studies on the
p-median problem used a centralised approach to find the near-optimal solution. In this case
the required information needs to be collected in order to apply a sequential algorithm to find
a solution.
The centralised approach is infeasible in large-scale networks due to the time and space
complexity of the sequential algorithms as well as the large communication cost and latency
to aggregate the global information. Therefore, this work investigates the p-median problem
in a distributed environment.
To the best of the authorâs knowledge, this is the first work to study the distributed pmedian problem for large-scale computer networks. Solving the p-median problem in a fully
distributed way is a challenging task due to the lack of global knowledge and of a centralised
coordinator.
Two new approaches for solving the p-median problem in a distributed environment are
proposed in this thesis. Both are designed to be executed without any centralised collection
of the data in a single node. These methods apply an iterative heuristic approach to improve
a random initial solution and to converge to a final solution with a local minimum of the cost.
The first approach builds a global view of the system and improves the current solution
by replacing a single facility at each iteration. The second approach, is designed according to the well-known k-medoids clustering
algorithm. At each iteration a local view of each cluster is generated and all facilities can be
updated to optimise the solution.
Both approaches were implemented within the Java-based PeerSim network simulator for
investigating the performance in large-scale systems and tested against different parameters
such as the size of networks, number of facilities to be placed and different initial solutions.
The results have shown that the first protocol is better at addressing locations for facilities
since it converges to a lower total cost of the solution than the second protocol. However, the
second one is faster in optimising the solution
The distributed p-median problem in computer networks
Many distributed services in computer networks rely on a set of active facilities that are selected among
a potentially large number of candidates. The active facilities then contribute and cooperate to deliver a
specific service to the users of the distributed system. In this scenario graph partitioning or clustering is
often adopted to determine the most efficient locations of the facilities. The identification of the optimal
set of facility locations is known as the p-median problem in networks, is NP-hard and is typically solved
by using heuristic methods. The goal is to select p locations among all candidate network nodes such that
some cost function is minimised. A typical example of such a function is the overall communication cost
to deliver the service to the users of the distributed system. Locating facilities in near-optimal locations
has been extensively studied for different application domains. Most of these studies have investigated
sequential algorithms and centralised approaches. However, centralised approaches are practically infeasible
in large-scale and dynamic networks, where the problem is inherently distributed or because of the large
communication overhead and memory requirements for gathering complete information about the network
topology and the users. In this work distributed approaches to the p-median problem are investigated.
Two solutions are proposed for addressing the facility locations problem in a fully distributed environment.
Two different iterative heuristic approaches are applied to gradually improve a random initial solution
and to converge to a final solution with a local minimum of the overall cost. While the first approach
adopts a fine granularity by identifying a single change to improve the solution at each iteration, the second
approach applies changes to every component of the solution at each iteration. An experimental comparative
analysis based on simulations has shown that the approach with a finer granularity is able to deliver a better
optimisation of the overall cost with longer convergence time. Both approaches have excellent scalability
and provide an effective tool to optimise the facility locations from within the network. No prior knowledge
of the system is required, no data needs to be gathered in a centralised server and the same process is used
to identify and to deploy the facility locations solution in the network since the process is fully decentralised
Coordination of Mobile Mules via Facility Location Strategies
In this paper, we study the problem of wireless sensor network (WSN)
maintenance using mobile entities called mules. The mules are deployed in the
area of the WSN in such a way that would minimize the time it takes them to
reach a failed sensor and fix it. The mules must constantly optimize their
collective deployment to account for occupied mules. The objective is to define
the optimal deployment and task allocation strategy for the mules, so that the
sensors' downtime and the mules' traveling distance are minimized. Our
solutions are inspired by research in the field of computational geometry and
the design of our algorithms is based on state of the art approximation
algorithms for the classical problem of facility location. Our empirical
results demonstrate how cooperation enhances the team's performance, and
indicate that a combination of k-Median based deployment with closest-available
task allocation provides the best results in terms of minimizing the sensors'
downtime but is inefficient in terms of the mules' travel distance. A
k-Centroid based deployment produces good results in both criteria.Comment: 12 pages, 6 figures, conferenc
Datacenter Traffic Control: Understanding Techniques and Trade-offs
Datacenters provide cost-effective and flexible access to scalable compute
and storage resources necessary for today's cloud computing needs. A typical
datacenter is made up of thousands of servers connected with a large network
and usually managed by one operator. To provide quality access to the variety
of applications and services hosted on datacenters and maximize performance, it
deems necessary to use datacenter networks effectively and efficiently.
Datacenter traffic is often a mix of several classes with different priorities
and requirements. This includes user-generated interactive traffic, traffic
with deadlines, and long-running traffic. To this end, custom transport
protocols and traffic management techniques have been developed to improve
datacenter network performance.
In this tutorial paper, we review the general architecture of datacenter
networks, various topologies proposed for them, their traffic properties,
general traffic control challenges in datacenters and general traffic control
objectives. The purpose of this paper is to bring out the important
characteristics of traffic control in datacenters and not to survey all
existing solutions (as it is virtually impossible due to massive body of
existing research). We hope to provide readers with a wide range of options and
factors while considering a variety of traffic control mechanisms. We discuss
various characteristics of datacenter traffic control including management
schemes, transmission control, traffic shaping, prioritization, load balancing,
multipathing, and traffic scheduling. Next, we point to several open challenges
as well as new and interesting networking paradigms. At the end of this paper,
we briefly review inter-datacenter networks that connect geographically
dispersed datacenters which have been receiving increasing attention recently
and pose interesting and novel research problems.Comment: Accepted for Publication in IEEE Communications Surveys and Tutorial
Modelling Clock Synchronization in the Chess gMAC WSN Protocol
We present a detailled timed automata model of the clock synchronization
algorithm that is currently being used in a wireless sensor network (WSN) that
has been developed by the Dutch company Chess. Using the Uppaal model checker,
we establish that in certain cases a static, fully synchronized network may
eventually become unsynchronized if the current algorithm is used, even in a
setting with infinitesimal clock drifts
- âŠ