Self-stabilizing wormhole routing on ring networks
Wormhole routing is the most common in parallel architecture in which messages are sent in small fragments called flits. It is a lightweight and efficient method of routing messages between parallel processors. Self-stabilization is a technique that guarantees tolerance to transient faults (e.g. memory corruption or communication hazard) for a given protocol. Self-stabilization guarantees that the network recovers to a correct behavior infinite time, without the need for human intervention. Self-stabilization also guarantees the safety property, meaning that once the network is in a legitimate state, it will remain there until another fault occurs. This paper presents the first self-stabilizing network algorithm in the wormhole routing model, using the unidirectional ring topology. Our solution benefits from wormhole routing by providing high throughput and low latency, and front self-stabilization by ensuring automatic resilience to all possible transient failures.

title: Self-Stabilizing Wormhole Routing on Ring Networks
abstract: Wormhole routing is most commonly used in parallel architectures in which messages are sent in small fragments, called flits. It is a lightweight and efficient method of routing messages between parallel processors. Self-stabilization is a technique that guarantees tolerance to transient faults (e.g., memory corruption or communication hazards) for a given protocol. Self-stabilization guarantees that the network recovers to a correct behavior in a finite amount of time, without the need for human intervention. Self-stabilization also guarantees the safety property, meaning that once the network is in a legitimate state, it will remain there until another fault occurs.
This paper presents the first self-stabilizing network algorithm in the wormhole routing model, using the unidirectional ring topology. Our solution benefits from wormhole routing by providing high throughput and low latency, and from self-stabilization by ensuring automatic resilience to all possible transient failures.

title: Deterministic /spl delta/-connected overlay for peer-to-peer networks
abstract: The network connectivity is a basic requirement while implementing fundamental communication and storage abstractions in P2P networks, featuring scalability and fault-tolerance. The quality of services of abstractions like for example multicast, publish/subscribe, group membership or persistent storage is strongly related to the connectivity degree of the underlying overlay. Intuitively, a higher overlay connectivity ensures a reinforced reliability and consequently, the deployment of distributed applications with real-time constraints on top of these overlays becomes feasible even in environments characterized by a high dynamicity, i.e., nodes arriving and departing at a high rate. Our paper proposes a novel delta-connected DHT-free P2P overlay. Our overlay offers strong connectivity guarantees despite the system dynamicity. The construction and the maintenance of our overlay is completely decentralized and handled strictly locally, through deterministic algorithms whose correctness is rigorously proved

title: Stabilizing mobile philosophers
abstract: We present a self-stabilizing solution to a new version of the dining philosophers problem. We call this problem mobile philosophers problem because the philosophers can move around a logical ring formed out of a dynamic network.

title: Anonymous publish/subscribe in P2P networks
abstract: One of the most important issues to deal with in peer-to-peer networks is how to disseminate information. In this paper, we use a completely new approach to solving the information dissemination problem. Our approach uses the publish/subscribe paradigm. The publish/subscribe method is the most inclusive strategy to establish communication between the information providers (publishers) and the information consumers (subscribers). We give a formal definition of publish/subscribe systems. We then use the publish/subscribe communication paradigm to design deterministic protocols (topic and content-based) for peer-to-peer networks. Our protocols are designed on top of an innovative information dissemination scheme, and can cope with the anonymity and mobility of both publishers and subscribers, weak-connectivity, and polarization, which are some of the characteristics of peer-to-peer networks. Moreover, in our solutions, every node could play a role of both publisher and subscriber The algorithms are designed completely independent of the underlying routing substrates. The key advantage of our protocols is that they are scalable without additional re-organization cost. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time the content-based subscription has been addressed in peer-to-peer networks.

title: Publish/subscribe scheme for mobile networks
abstract: The information dissemination in mobile networks is an important but complex and challenging problem. Designing suitable communication primitives for these systems is critical. One of these primitives is the publish/subscribe paradigm. The publish/subscribe is a strategy to establish communication between the information providers (publishers) and information consumers (subscribers) in a distributed system. Our work focuses on an appropriate distributed infrastructure suitable for a scalable implementation of a publish/subscribe system. We present a formal model which is adapted for the peer-based particular subscription criteria of publish/subscribe systems. Moreover, we propose a general deterministic information diffusion scheme for mobile systems. The three main features of our communication scheme are the following: First, our scheme is well-adapted to scalable systems without compromising any subscription criteria or network reorganization. Second, we maintain the anonymity of the distributed system --- in order to maintain the network structure, we need only local information. Third, our solution is fully decentralized and modular, thus making it appropriate for practical implementations.

title: MANDATE: MAnaging Networks Using DAtabase TEchnology
abstract: There has been a growing demand for the development of tools to manage enterprise communication networks. A management information database is the heart of a network management system-it provides the interface between all functions of the network management system and, therefore, has to provide sophisticated functionality allied with high performance. The authors introduce the design of MANDATE (MAnaging Networks using DAtabase TEchnology), a proposed database system for effectively supporting the management of large enterprise networks. The MANDATE design makes a conscious attempt to take advantage of the special characteristics of network data and transactions, and of advances in database technology, to efficiently derive some of the required management functionality.

title: Jigsaw Texture Synthesis
abstract: Texture synthesis aims to seamlessly extend a sample texture. This can be achieved by reproducing the texture's recognisable patterns along with minimising the occurrences of undesirable image characteristics such as disjoint image features. Presently, patch-based methods have consistently produced the most impressive results. These methods involve aligning and stitching texture patches together. However, image inconsistencies exist when image features are misaligned; they are either fused together or abruptly cut off. Our method minimises the occurrences of these anomalies by using image edges to align patches and redefine their boundaries to preserve texture features. This implementation requires little to no user-defined variables or iterations and can be practically scalable given some pre-computation.

title: Compositional analysis of contract signing protocols
abstract: We develop a general method for reasoning about contract-signing protocols using a specialized protocol logic. The method is applied to prove properties of the Asokan-Shoup-Waidner and the Garay-Jacobson-MacKenzie protocols. Our method offers certain advantages over previous analysis techniques. First, it is compositional: the security guarantees are proved by combining the independent proofs for the three sub-protocols of which each protocol is comprised. Second, the formal proofs are carried out in a "template" form, which gives us a reusable proof that may be instantiated for the ASW and GJM protocols, as well as for other protocols with the same arrangement of messages. Third, the proofs follow the design intuition. In particular, in proving game-theoretic properties like fairness, we demonstrate that the specific strategy that the protocol designer had in mind works, instead of showing that one exists. Finally, our results hold even when an unbounded number of sessions are executed in parallel.

title: Generating Boolean networks with a prescribed attractor structure
abstract: Dynamical modeling of gene regulation via network models constitutes a key problem for genomics. The long-run characteristics of a dynamical system are critical and their determination is a primary aspect of system analysis. In the other direction, system synthesis involves constructing a network possessing a given set of properties. This constitutes the inverse problem. Generally, the inverse problem is ill-posed, meaning there will be many networks, or perhaps none, possessing the desired properties. Relative to long-run behavior, we may wish to construct networks possessing a desirable steady-state distribution. This paper addresses the long-run inverse problem pertaining to Boolean networks (BNs).



The long-run behavior of a BN is characterized by its attractors. The rest of the state transition diagram is partitioned into level sets, the j-th level set being composed of all states that transition to one of the attractor states in exactly j transitions. We present two algorithms for the attractor inverse problem. The attractors are specified, and the sizes of the predictor sets and the number of levels are constrained. Algorithm complexity and performance are analyzed. The algorithmic solutions have immediate application. Under the assumption that sampling is from the steady state, a basic criterion for checking the validity of a designed network is that there should be concordance between the attractor states of the model and the data states. This criterion can be used to test a design algorithm: randomly select a set of states to be used as data states; generate a BN possessing the selected states as attractors, perhaps with some added requirements such as constraints on the number of predictors and the level structure; apply the design algorithm; and check the concordance between the attractor states of the designed network and the data states.


AVAILABILITY
The software and supplementary material is available at http://gsp.tamu.edu/Publications/BNs/bn.htm

title: Secure Protocol Composition
abstract: This paper continues the program initiated in , towards a derivation system for security protocols. The general idea is that complex protocols can be formally derived, starting from basic security components, using a sequence of refinements and transformations, just like logical proofs are derived starting from axioms, using proof rules and transformations. The claim is that in practice, many protocols are already derived in such a way, but informally. Capturing this practice in a suitable formalism turns out to be a considerable task. The present paper proposes rules for composing security protocols from given security components. In general, security protocols are, of course, not compositional: information revealed by one may interfere with the security of the other. However, annotating protocol steps by pre- and post-conditions, allows secure sequential composition. Establishing that protocol components satisfy each other's invariants allows more general forms of composition, ensuring that the individually secure sub-protocols will not interact insecurely in the composite protocol. The applicability of the method is demonstrated on modular derivations of two standard protocols, together with their simple security properties.