576 research outputs found
Consensus Propagation
We propose consensus propagation, an asynchronous distributed protocol for
averaging numbers across a network. We establish convergence, characterize the
convergence rate for regular graphs, and demonstrate that the protocol exhibits
better scaling properties than pairwise averaging, an alternative that has
received much recent attention. Consensus propagation can be viewed as a
special case of belief propagation, and our results contribute to the belief
propagation literature. In particular, beyond singly-connected graphs, there
are very few classes of relevant problems for which belief propagation is known
to converge.Comment: journal versio
On the Flow-level Dynamics of a Packet-switched Network
The packet is the fundamental unit of transportation in modern communication
networks such as the Internet. Physical layer scheduling decisions are made at
the level of packets, and packet-level models with exogenous arrival processes
have long been employed to study network performance, as well as design
scheduling policies that more efficiently utilize network resources. On the
other hand, a user of the network is more concerned with end-to-end bandwidth,
which is allocated through congestion control policies such as TCP.
Utility-based flow-level models have played an important role in understanding
congestion control protocols. In summary, these two classes of models have
provided separate insights for flow-level and packet-level dynamics of a
network
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