11,181 research outputs found
From Packet to Power Switching: Digital Direct Load Scheduling
At present, the power grid has tight control over its dispatchable generation
capacity but a very coarse control on the demand. Energy consumers are shielded
from making price-aware decisions, which degrades the efficiency of the market.
This state of affairs tends to favor fossil fuel generation over renewable
sources. Because of the technological difficulties of storing electric energy,
the quest for mechanisms that would make the demand for electricity
controllable on a day-to-day basis is gaining prominence. The goal of this
paper is to provide one such mechanisms, which we call Digital Direct Load
Scheduling (DDLS). DDLS is a direct load control mechanism in which we unbundle
individual requests for energy and digitize them so that they can be
automatically scheduled in a cellular architecture. Specifically, rather than
storing energy or interrupting the job of appliances, we choose to hold
requests for energy in queues and optimize the service time of individual
appliances belonging to a broad class which we refer to as "deferrable loads".
The function of each neighborhood scheduler is to optimize the time at which
these appliances start to function. This process is intended to shape the
aggregate load profile of the neighborhood so as to optimize an objective
function which incorporates the spot price of energy, and also allows
distributed energy resources to supply part of the generation dynamically.Comment: Accepted by the IEEE journal of Selected Areas in Communications
(JSAC): Smart Grid Communications series, to appea
Time and Location Aware Mobile Data Pricing
Mobile users' correlated mobility and data consumption patterns often lead to
severe cellular network congestion in peak hours and hot spots. This paper
presents an optimal design of time and location aware mobile data pricing,
which incentivizes users to smooth traffic and reduce network congestion. We
derive the optimal pricing scheme through analyzing a two-stage decision
process, where the operator determines the time and location aware prices by
minimizing his total cost in Stage I, and each mobile user schedules his mobile
traffic by maximizing his payoff (i.e., utility minus payment) in Stage II. We
formulate the two-stage decision problem as a bilevel optimization problem, and
propose a derivative-free algorithm to solve the problem for any increasing
concave user utility functions. We further develop low complexity algorithms
for the commonly used logarithmic and linear utility functions. The optimal
pricing scheme ensures a win-win situation for the operator and users.
Simulations show that the operator can reduce the cost by up to 97.52% in the
logarithmic utility case and 98.70% in the linear utility case, and users can
increase their payoff by up to 79.69% and 106.10% for the two types of
utilities, respectively, comparing with a time and location independent pricing
benchmark. Our study suggests that the operator should provide price discounts
at less crowded time slots and locations, and the discounts need to be
significant when the operator's cost of provisioning excessive traffic is high
or users' willingness to delay traffic is low.Comment: This manuscript serves as the online technical report of the article
accepted by IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computin
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
A cross-layer approach to enhance QoS for multimedia applications over satellite
The need for on-demand QoS support for communications over satellite is of primary importance for distributed multimedia applications. This is particularly true for the return link which is often a bottleneck due to the large set of end-users accessing a very limited uplink resource. Facing this need, Demand Assignment Multiple Access (DAMA) is a classical technique that allows satellite operators to offer various types of services, while managing the resources of the satellite system efficiently. Tackling the quality degradation and delay accumulation issues that can result from the use of these techniques, this paper proposes an instantiation of the Application Layer Framing (ALF) approach, using a cross-layer interpreter(xQoS-Interpreter). The information provided by this interpreter is used to manage the resource provided to a terminal by the satellite system in order to improve the quality of multimedia presentations from the end users point of view. Several experiments are carried out for different loads on the return link. Their impact on QoS is measured through different application as well as network level metrics
Trade & Cap: A Customer-Managed, Market-Based System for Trading Bandwidth Allowances at a Shared Link
We propose Trade & Cap (T&C), an economics-inspired mechanism that incentivizes users to voluntarily coordinate their consumption of the bandwidth of a shared resource (e.g., a DSLAM link) so as to converge on what they perceive to be an equitable allocation, while ensuring efficient resource utilization. Under T&C, rather than acting as an arbiter, an Internet Service Provider (ISP) acts as an enforcer of what the community of rational users sharing the resource decides is a fair allocation of that resource. Our T&C mechanism proceeds in two phases. In the first, software agents acting on behalf of users engage in a strategic trading game in which each user agent selfishly chooses bandwidth slots to reserve in support of primary, interactive network usage activities. In the second phase, each user is allowed to acquire additional bandwidth slots in support of presumed open-ended need for fluid bandwidth, catering to secondary applications. The acquisition of this fluid bandwidth is subject to the remaining "buying power" of each user and by prevalent "market prices" â both of which are determined by the results of the trading phase and a desirable aggregate cap on link utilization. We present analytical results that establish the underpinnings of our T&C mechanism, including game-theoretic results pertaining to the trading phase, and pricing of fluid bandwidth allocation pertaining to the capping phase. Using real network traces, we present extensive experimental results that demonstrate the benefits of our scheme, which we also show to be practical by highlighting the salient features of an efficient implementation architecture.National Science Foundation (CCF-0820138, CSR-0720604, EFRI-0735974, CNS-0524477, and CNS-0520166); Universidad Pontificia Bolivariana and COLCIENCIASâInstituto Colombiano para el Desarrollo de la Ciencia y la TecnologĂa âFrancisco Jose Ì de Caldasâ
A new approach to service provisioning in ATM networks
The authors formulate and solve a problem of allocating resources among competing services differentiated by user traffic characteristics and maximum end-to-end delay. The solution leads to an alternative approach to service provisioning in an ATM network, in which the network offers directly for rent its bandwidth and buffers and users purchase freely resources to meet their desired quality. Users make their decisions based on their own traffic parameters and delay requirements and the network sets prices for those resources. The procedure is iterative in that the network periodically adjusts prices based on monitored user demand, and is decentralized in that only local information is needed for individual users to determine resource requests. The authors derive the network's adjustment scheme and the users' decision rule and establish their optimality. Since the approach does not require the network to know user traffic and delay parameters, it does not require traffic policing on the part of the network
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