Improving VANET Protocols via Network Science

Developing routing protocols for Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs) is a significant challenge in these large, self- organized and distributed networks. We address this challenge by studying VANETs from a network science perspective to develop solutions that act locally but influence the network performance globally. More specifically, we look at snapshots from highway and urban VANETs of different sizes and vehicle densities, and study parameters such as the node degree distribution, the clustering coefficient and the average shortest path length, in order to better understand the networks' structure and compare it to structures commonly found in large real world networks such as small-world and scale-free networks. We then show how to use this information to improve existing VANET protocols. As an illustrative example, it is shown that, by adding new mechanisms that make use of this information, the overhead of the urban vehicular broadcasting (UV-CAST) protocol can be reduced substantially with no significant performance degradation.Comment: Proceedings of the 2012 IEEE Vehicular Networking Conference (VNC), Korea, November 201

Task mapping on a dragonfly supercomputer

The dragonfly network topology has recently gained traction in the design of high performance computing (HPC) systems and has been implemented in large-scale supercomputers. The impact of task mapping, i.e., placement of MPI ranks onto compute cores, on the communication performance of applications on dragonfly networks has not been comprehensively investigated on real large-scale systems. This paper demonstrates that task mapping affects the communication overhead significantly in dragonflies and the magnitude of this effect is sensitive to the application, job size, and the OpenMP settings. Among the three task mapping algorithms we study (in-order, random, and recursive coordinate bisection), selecting a suitable task mapper reduces application communication time by up to 47%

Truncating and Oversampling OFDM Signals in White Gaussian Noise Channels

This work introduces a modified version of the orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) signal by truncating OFDM symbols in the time domain. Sub-carriers are no longer orthogonally packed in the frequency domain as time samples are only partially transmitted, leading to improved spectral efficiency. In this work, mathematical expressions are derived for the newly proposed Truncated OFDM (TOFDM) signal, followed by interference analysis and performance comparisons. We also consider optimal and practical decoder architectures. Results from a Sphere Decoder-based decoder indicate that truncation length can significantly affect the error performance. With short truncation length, using a purpose designed detector, signals can be recovered even with truncated symbol transmission