Optimisation of Mobile Communication Networks - OMCO NET

The mini conference “Optimisation of Mobile Communication Networks” focuses on advanced methods for search and optimisation applied to wireless communication networks. It is sponsored by Research & Enterprise Fund Southampton Solent University. The conference strives to widen knowledge on advanced search methods capable of optimisation of wireless communications networks. The aim is to provide a forum for exchange of recent knowledge, new ideas and trends in this progressive and challenging area. The conference will popularise new successful approaches on resolving hard tasks such as minimisation of transmit power, cooperative and optimal routing

Scheduling commercial advertisements for television

The problem of scheduling the commercial advertisements in the television industry is investigated. Each advertiser client demands that the multiple airings of the same brand advertisement should be as spaced as possible over a given time period. Moreover, audience rating requests have to be taken into account in the scheduling. This is the first time this hard decision problem is dealt with in the literature. We design two mixed integer linear programming (MILP) models. Two constructive heuristics, local search procedures and simulated annealing (SA) approaches are also proposed. Extensive computational experiments, using several instances of various sizes, are performed. The results show that the proposed MILP model which represents the problem as a network flow obtains a larger number of optimal solutions and the best non-exact procedure is the one that uses SA

On the design and implementation of broadcast and global combine operations using the postal model

There are a number of models that were proposed in recent years for message passing parallel systems. Examples are the postal model and its generalization the LogP model. In the postal model a parameter λ is used to model the communication latency of the message-passing system. Each node during each round can send a fixed-size message and, simultaneously, receive a message of the same size. Furthermore, a message sent out during round r will incur a latency of hand will arrive at the receiving node at round r + λ - 1. Our goal in this paper is to bridge the gap between the theoretical modeling and the practical implementation. In particular, we investigate a number of practical issues related to the design and implementation of two collective communication operations, namely, the broadcast operation and the global combine operation. Those practical issues include, for example, 1) techniques for measurement of the value of λ on a given machine, 2) creating efficient broadcast algorithms that get the latency hand the number of nodes n as parameters and 3) creating efficient global combine algorithms for parallel machines with λ which is not an integer. We propose solutions that address those practical issues and present results of an experimental study of the new algorithms on the Intel Delta machine. Our main conclusion is that the postal model can help in performance prediction and tuning, for example, a properly tuned broadcast improves the known implementation by more than 20%