Availability-Aware Provisioning Strategies for Differentiated Protection Services in Wavelength-Convertible WDM Mesh Networks
In an optical WDM mesh network, different protection schemes (such as dedicated or shared protection) can be used to improve the service availability against network failures. However, in order to satisfy a connections service-availability requirement in a cost-effective and resource-efficient manner, we need a systematic mechanism to select a proper protection scheme for each connection request while provisioning the connection. In this paper, we propose to use connection availability as a metric to provide differentiated protection services in a wavelength-convertible WDM mesh network. We develop a mathematical model to analyze the availabilities of connections with different protection modes (i.e., unprotected, dedicated protected, or shared protected). In the shared-protection case, we investigate how a connection's availability is affected by backup resource sharing. The sharing might cause backup resource contention between several connections when multiple simultaneous (or overlapping) failures occur in the network. Using a continuous-time Markov model, we derive the conditional probability for a connection to acquire backup resources in the presence of backup resource contention. Through this model, we show how the availability of a shared-protected connection can be quantitatively computed. Based on the analytical model, we develop provisioning strategies for a given set of connection demands in which an appropriate, possibly different, level of protection is provided to each connection according to its predefined availability requirement, e.g., 0.999, 0.997. We propose integer linear programming (ILP) and heuristic approaches to provision the connections cost effectively while satisfying the connections' availability requirements. The effectiveness of our provisioning approaches is demonstrated through numerical examples. The proposed provisioning strategies inherently facilitate the service differentiation in optical WDM mesh networks.

title: An Efficient Approach for Service Process Reconfiguration in SOA with End-to-End QoS Constraints
abstract: Using SOA, service processes can be composed statically or dynamically using services provided by different service providers. Some services may become faulty at runtime and cause the service process to violate the end-to-end quality of service (QoS) constraint. We propose an efficient approach for replacing faulty services to ensure that the reconfigured service process still meets the original end-to-end QoS constraint. We use an iterative algorithm to identify reconfiguration regions that have a small number of services, some faulty and some healthy, in order to have more service selection options. By reconfiguring services in these selected regions rather than the whole service process, the computational complexity is significantly reduced. Simulation study has shown that our approach is efficient as most service processes can be repaired by replacing only a small number of services.

title: Optimized routing for fault management in optical burst-switched WDM networks
abstract: Optical burst switching (OBS) is a promising technique for supporting high-capacity, bursty data traffic over optical wavelength-division-multiplexed (WDM) networks. An optical link failure may result in a huge amount of data (and revenue) loss, and it has been an important survivability concern in optical networks. In this paper, we study the fault- management issues related with a link failure in an OBS network. We propose to use pre-planned global rerouting to balance network load and to reroute bursts after a link fails. We apply optimization techniques to pre-plan explicit backup routes for failure scenarios. Our objective is to achieve optimal load balancing both before and after a failure such that the network state can still remain stable with minimum burst-loss probability when a failure occurs. We apply the pre-planned normal and backup routing tables to an OBS network, and study the network performance after a failure occur using illustrative numerical examples. The results show that the average burst-loss probability can be significantly reduced by 60% - from an average of 0.10 to 0.04 (when the normalized link load is less than 0.5) using globally-rerouted backup routes, when compared with the scheme without global rerouting. We also observe that the burst-loss probability is reduced by 43% - from an average of 0.07 to 0.04 (when the link load is less than 0.5) if the rerouting is done using optimization techniques, when compared with shortest-path routing.for Fault Management

title: Backup reprovisioning to remedy the effect of multiple link failures in WDM mesh networks
abstract: As networks grow in size and complexity, both the probability and the impact of failures increase. The pre-allocated backup bandwidth, which has been widely investigated in the literature, may not be able to provide full protection guarantee when multiple failures occur in a network. In this study, we consider multiple concurrent failures where concurrent means that a new failure occurs before a previous failure is repaired. To combat the effect of multiple concurrent failures, new backups can be reprovisioned after one failure such that the next potential failure can be handled effectively and efficiently. We consider dynamic traffic where a pair of link-disjoint primary and backup paths is provisioned when a new connection request arrives. After a failure occurs, the affected connections switch traffic from their primary paths to backup paths. To protect against next potential failure, we reprovision new backups for connections that become unprotected or vulnerable because of losing their primary or their backup due to the previous failure or due to backup resource sharing. This approach is called Minimal Backup Reprovisioning (MBR). An alternative approach is to globally rearrange backups for all connections after one failure occurs, which is called Global Backup Reprovisioning (GBR). Backup reprovisioning can be performed whenever the network's state changes, e.g., (1) when a new request arrives, (2) when an existing connection terminates, (3) when a network failure occurs, (4) when a failed link/node is repaired, etc., to utilize the available resources more efficiently or to recover quickly from the next failure. In this study, we perform MBR or GBR after one network failure occurs to protect against the next potential failure in a wavelength-convertible WDM mesh network. The link-vector network model which can maximally explore the backup-sharing potential is assumed in this study. We then analyze the complexity of MBR and GBR under such a network model. A reprovisioning algorithm is proposed for MBR which can significantly reduce the connection vulnerability without the knowledge of the location of the next failure. In GBR, both integer linear program (ILP) and heuristic-based approaches are proposed. We compare capacity requirement and computational complexity of MBR to that of GBR through numerical examples. MBR demonstrates a good tradeoff between complexity and capacity efficiency to handle multiple concurrent failures

title: Explicit Routing for Traffic Engineering in Labeled Optical Burst-Switched WDM Networks
abstract: Optical burst switching (OBS) is a promising technique for supporting high-capacity bursty data traffic over optical wavelength-division-multiplexed (WDM) networks. A label-switched path can be established to forward a burst control packet (BCP) if each OBS node is augmented with an IP/MPLS controller. Such a network is called a labeled OBS (LOBS) network, and it can exploit the explicit routing and constraint-based routing properties supported in the MPLS framework to perform traffic and resource engineering. In this paper, we consider the traffic-engineering problem in a LOBS network, using explicit routing to balance network load and to reduce the burst-loss probability. We model the traffic-engineering problem in a LOBS network as an optimization problem and propose two new objective functions to minimize network congestion. Our illustrative numerical examples show that the burst-loss probability can be significantly reduced using optimization technique, when compared with shortest-path routing.

title: The LLAMA Middleware Support for Accountable Service-Oriented Architecture
abstract: Enterprises are turning to SOA for the flexible deployment of business processes. While current monitoring tools can detect service execution problems in an enterprise's servers and report such problems to human decision makers, they may not closely monitor the external services they use, diagnose the root cause of process problems, and automatically reconfigure the process to replace faulty services. This paper presents the LLAMA middleware support for service process monitoring, run-time management, and configuration. Instances of accountability agents are deployed to selectively monitor some services' performance. These agents in turn allow LLAMA's Accountability Authority (AA) to diagnose process problems and apply any necessary reconfiguration. The project also builds tools to simplify the setup and deployment of LLAMA components. Our experimental results indicate that using LLAMA contributes only a modest amount of system overhead, and that the diagnosis process is swift and sufficiently accurate.

title: Event-Based Summarization Using Critical Temporal Event Term Chain
abstract: In this paper, we investigate whether temporal relations among event terms can help improve event-based summarization and text cohesion of final summaries. By connecting event terms with happens-before relations, we build a temporal event term graph for source documents. The event terms in the critical temporal event term chain identified from the maximal weakly connected component are used to evaluate the sentences in source documents. The most significant sentences are included in final summaries. Experiments conducted on the DUC 2001 corpus show that event-based summarization using the critical temporal event term chain is able to organize final summaries in a more coherent way and make improvement over the well-known tf*idf-based and PageRank-based summarization approaches.

title: ArnetMiner: extraction and mining of academic social networks
abstract: This paper addresses several key issues in the ArnetMiner system, which aims at extracting and mining academic social networks. Specifically, the system focuses on: 1) Extracting researcher profiles automatically from the Web; 2) Integrating the publication data into the network from existing digital libraries; 3) Modeling the entire academic network; and 4) Providing search services for the academic network. So far, 448,470 researcher profiles have been extracted using a unified tagging approach. We integrate publications from online Web databases and propose a probabilistic framework to deal with the name ambiguity problem. Furthermore, we propose a unified modeling approach to simultaneously model topical aspects of papers, authors, and publication venues. Search services such as expertise search and people association search have been provided based on the modeling results. In this paper, we describe the architecture and main features of the system. We also present the empirical evaluation of the proposed methods.

title: A Novel Video Searching Model Based on Ontology Inference and Multimodal Information Fusion
abstract: Video comprises multiple types of textual, audio and visual information, and each of them contains abundant semantic information. Therefore multimodal features query and fusion are necessary in video retrieval. In this paper, we propose a new video retrieval model, which adopts multi-model including text, image, semantic concept and camera motion to query video. Then relation algebra expression is advanced to fuse multimodal information instead of traditional linear fusion method. In semantic concept detection model, Bayesian network based ontology is proposed to extract concepts. The experiments on TRECVID 2005 corpus have demonstrated a superior performance compared with exiting key approaches of video retrieval by multimodal information fusion.

title: Optimized NURBS Curve and Surface Fitting Using Simulated Annealing

title: Performance study of Markov modulated fluid flow models with priority traffic
abstract: The steady-state performance of generic high-speed queuing system with priority traffic is studied, using the Markov modulated fluid models. the focus is on systems with traffic partitioned into two priorities according to a splitting factor alpha , so that low priority traffic can be discarded when congestion occurs. The results are used to further study issues of congestion control with priority traffic. In particular, the expected values, waiting times, variances of the buffer contents, and tail distributions are evaluated. It is found that the waiting time is more sensitive to changes of alpha than the buffer contents. This shows that for time-constrained traffic, the priority assignment is important for properly balancing the tradeoff between packet loss and delays. This model can be considered as a direct extension of the fluid-flow model to include priorities.<<ETX>>