IEEE Communications Surveys & Tutorials - second quarter 2008

2 Welcome to the second IEEE Communications Surveys and Tutorials issue of 2008. The articles in this issue, which we now briefly introduce include four surveys on topics such as resource discovery in Grids and Inter-vehicle communication systems. Efficient resource discovery mechanism is one of the fundamental requirement to resource management and scheduling of applications Ingrid networks. Resource discovery involves searching for the appropriate resource types that match the application requirements. Various kinds of solutions have been proposed lately. However, some of them have serious limitations in regard to scalability, fault-tolerance and network congestion. To overcome these limitations, indexing resource information using a decentralized network model has been a focus of investigation in the past few years. In Peer-toPeer Based Resource Discovery in Global Grids: A Tutorial, Rajiv Ranjan, Aaron Harwood and Rajkumar Buyya investigate various decentralized resource discovery techniques primarily driven by P2P network model. Special emphasis is given to P2P taxonomy with focus on extending the current structured systems (such as Distributed Hash Tables) for indexing d-dimensional grid resource queries. Fault tolerant frameworks are based on resource redundancy to provide reliable execution of services when the legitimate processing server goes down. They are built upon two key concepts: fault detection and fault recovery. Several issues are involved: resource consumption inherent to the granularity of the failure detection and recovery, the strength of the fault model in terms of fine-grained failover, client transparency and failure detection robustness, and the impact of the failure recovery procedure on the end-to-end Quality of Service of highly available service during both failure and failure free periods. In “A Survey on Fault Tolerance Approaches and Issues for Highly Available Internet Services,” Narjess Ayari and Denis Barbaron overview fault tolerance concepts and approaches in Internet service provisioning. Accurate measurement, inference and modeling techniques are fundamental to the establishment of the characteristics of the Internet topology. A vital step towards achieving such goal is the availability of network topologies at different levels of granularity, that is, provisioning of the so-called Internet Maps. In “A Survey on Network Topology: Inference, Modelling and Generation,” Hamed Haddadi, Gianluca Iannaccone, Andrew Moore, Richard Mortier, Miguel Rio provide a survey of the latest advances in research on various aspects of network topology over the past decade. Techniques of inference of the Internet topology at router level and administrative level are analyzed as well as mathematical models which have been assigned to various topologies and the generation softwares based on them. Since its advent, TCP has been the subject to a large amount of research efforts and enhancements for achieving better performance over various network environments. Due to the transmission characteristics of Optical Burst Switched (OBS) networks, such as random burst dropping, retroblocking, burstification delay, and burst signaling delay, TCP can be significantly affected in case no corresponding countermeasure and enhancement is developed. In “Transport Control Protocol (TCP) in Optical Burst Switched Networks: issues, solutions and Challenges,” Basem Shihada and Pin-Han Ho provide a comprehensive survey on reported studies for TCP enhancements over OBS networks in order to mitigate the numerous side effects due to the bufferless characteristic of burst transmission. Inter-vehicle communication (IVC) systems have the S U R V E Y S I E E E C O M M U N I C AT I O N S