CORBA-Based, Multi-threaded Distributed Simulation of Hierarchical DEVS Models: Transforming Model Structure into a Non-hierarchical One
The Discrete Event Systems Specification (DEVS) formalism specifies a discrete event system in a hierarchical, modular form. This paper presents DEVSCluster, a CORBA-Based, multi-threaded distributed simulation scheme for models specified by the DEVS formalism. The simulator transforms a hierarchical DEVS model into a non-hierarchical one. This transformation can ease the synchronization of the distributed simulation of DEVS models by enabling the transfer of events by direct remote method invocations, not explicit message transfers. By virtue of this feature, we can utilize CORBA for the event handling in DEVSCluster. To show the effectiveness of the proposed simulation scheme, we realize DEVSCluster in Visual C++, and conduct a benchmark simulation for a large-scale logistics system. We compare the performance of MPI and CORBA-based implementations. The performance result shows that the proposed methodology works correctly and performs better than the previous approaches.

title: A Resilient Multipath Routing Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks
abstract: Wireless sensor networks should be self-configuring, highly scalable, redundant, and robust in dealing with shifting topologies due to node failure and environment changes. The energy of a sensor node is the most important system resource, and one of the best ways of conserving energy is to distribute the routing load across all sensor nodes as much equally as possible. Considering the load balance for conserving energy, multipath routing protocols have been employed in sensor networks. In this paper we present a resilient multipath routing protocol based on AODV, named as RMRP, for wireless sensor networks. RMRP is an AODV-based multipath routing protocol in which sensor nodes setup double routing paths toward sink nodes in an AODV fashion and select one of them randomly for forwarding a packet. RMRP proposes a resilient route maintenance scheme which repairs broken links by utilizing localized information around neighbor nodes of the broken link, thereby reducing the flooding range of control messages. To show the effectiveness of the proposed route maintenance scheme, we evaluate the performance enhancement of the proposed scheme by ns2-based simulation.

title: Mobility Agent Advertisement Mechanism for Supporting Mobile IP in Ad Hoc Networks
abstract: Mobile IP has been proposed to solve the problem of how a mobile node may roam from its network and still maintain connectivity to the internet. Another emerging wireless architecture, mobile ad hoc networks (MANET), can be flexibly deployed in most environments without the need for infrastructure base stations. Integrating Mobile IP and MANET will facilitate the current trend of moving to an all-IP wireless environment. In this paper we propose an architecture of integrating Mobile IP and MANET based on the on-demand routing protocols. The proposed architecture employs two agent advertisement mechanisms, Mobility Agent Advertisement Mechanism (MAAM) and Aggregation-based Mobility Agent Advertisement Mechanism (AMAAM). In both mechanisms the mobility agent uses periodic beaconing of agent advertisement messages with on-demand routing protocols. Despite its architectural advantage, MAAM has some performance issues to be tackled because it incurs excessive generation of registration request messages of mobile nodes. AMAAM is an enhancement of MAAM for reducing the overhead of the beaconing by aggregating the reply messages of the agent advertisement. The simulation results show that AMAAM can effectively reduce the overhead of periodic agent advertisement and registration process.

title: Design of a Service Discovery Architecture for Mobility-Supported Wired and Wireless Networks
abstract: Automatic service discovery will play an essential role in future network scenario and is an important component for MANET and collaboration in ubiquitous computing environment. This paper proposes a service discovery architecture, named as SLPA (Service Location Protocol based on AMAAM) in the mobility-supported wired and wireless environment of which the underlying protocol is AMAAM which is an aggregation-based Mobile IP implementation in MANET. In SLPA, the role of the directory agent is assigned to the mobility agent in AMAAM. The mobility agent periodically beacons an advertisement message which contains both the advertisement of the directory agent in SLP and the advertisement of the mobility agent in Mobile IP. For evaluating the functional correctness of SLPA and the overhead of maintaining a service directory in MANET, we simulate SLPA and analyze the overhead of control overheads for the aggregation. Through the simulation experiments, we investigate the functional correctness of the proposed architecture and analyze the control overheads of the aggregation.

title: Performance of Service Location Protocols in MANET Based on Reactive Routing Protocols
abstract: Automatic service discovery, the problem of discovering service providers by specifying desired properties of services, is an important and necessary component for collaboration in the ubiquitous computing environment such as MANET. This paper investigates the effects of the on-demand route discovery on the performance of service location protocols in MANET based on on-demand routing protocols. We first design a service discovery architecture in MANET based on AODV and evaluate both the distributed and centralized versions of the architecture by simulation. For evaluating the performance, we examine such performance metrics as service hit ratio, service discovery time, and control message overheads. The results show that the distributed scheme outperforms the centralized scheme in most simulation scenarios because of the on-demand routing overheads.

title: A Web Services-Based Distributed Simulation Architecture for Hierarchical DEVS Models
abstract: The Discrete Event Systems Specification (DEVS) formalism specifies a discrete event system in a hierarchical, modular form. This paper presents a web-services-based distributed simulation architecture for DEVS models, named as DEVSCluster-WS. DEVSCluster-WS is actually an enhanced version of DEVSCluster by employing the web services technology, thereby retaining the advantages of the non-hierarchical distributed simulation compared to the previous hierarchical distributed simulations. By employing the web services technologies, it describes models by WSDL and utilizes SOAP and XML for inter-node communication. Due to the standardized nature of the web service technology, DEVSCluster-WS can effectively be embedded in the Internet without adhering to specific vendors and languages. To show the effectiveness of DEVSCluster-WS, we realize it in Visual C++ and SOAPToolkit, and conduct a benchmark simulation for a large-scale logistics system. We compare the performance of DEVSCluster-WS with DEVSCluster-MPI, the MPI-based implementation of DEVSCluster. The performance result shows that the proposed architecture works correctly and could achieve tolerable performance.

title: TCP throughput analysis under transmission error and congestion losses
abstract: This paper analyzes the performance of a large population of long lived TCP flows experiencing random packet losses due to both random transmission errors and congestion created by the sharing of a common tail drop bottleneck router. We propose a natural and simple model for the joint throughput evolution of the set of TCP sessions under such a mix of losses. For the case of Poisson transmission errors, we show that the asymptotic model where the population tends to infinity leads to a well defined and tractable dynamical system. In particular, we get the mean value of the throughput of each session as a function of the transmission error rate and the synchronization rate in the bottleneck router. The large population asymptotic model has two interesting and non-intuitive properties: 1) there exists a positive threshold (given in closed form) on the transmission error rate above which there are no congestion losses at all in steady state; 2) below this threshold, the mean throughput of each flow is an increasing function of the transmission error rate, so that the maximum mean value is in fact achieved when the transmission error rate is equal to this threshold. The finite population model and models based on other classes of point processes are also studied. In particular, a sufficient condition is obtained for the existence of congestion times in the case of arbitrary transmission error point processes.

title: Optimizing multidimensional index trees for main memory access
abstract: Recent studies have shown that cache-conscious indexes such as the CSB+-tree outperform conventional main memory indexes such as the T-tree. The key idea of these cache-conscious indexes is to eliminate most of child pointers from a node to increase the fanout of the tree. When the node size is chosen in the order of the cache block size, this pointer elimination effectively reduces the tree height, and thus improves the cache behavior of the index. However, the pointer elimination cannot be directly applied to multidimensional index structures such as the R-tree, where the size of a key, typically, an MBR (minimum bounding rectangle), is much larger than that of a pointer. Simple elimination of four-byte pointers does not help much to pack more entries in a node.
This paper proposes a cache-conscious version of the R-tree called the CR-tree. To pack more entries in a node, the CR-tree compresses MBR keys, which occupy almost 80% of index data in the two-dimensional case. It first represents the coordinates of an MBR key relatively to the lower left corner of its parent MBR to eliminate the leading O's from the relative coordinate representation. Then, it quantizes the relative coordinates with a fixed number of bits to further cut off the trailing less significant bits. Consequently, the CR-tree becomes significantly wider and smaller than the ordinary R-tree. Our experimental and analytical study shows that the two-dimensional CR-tree performs search up to 2.5 times faster than the ordinary R-tree while maintaining similar update performance and consuming about 60% less memory space.

title: Multi-camera Tracking and Segmentation of Occluded People on Ground Plane Using Search-Guided Particle Filtering
abstract: A multi-view multi-hypothesis approach to segmenting and tracking multiple (possibly occluded) persons on a ground plane is proposed. During tracking, several iterations of segmentation are performed using information from human appearance models and ground plane homography. To more precisely locate the ground location of a person, all center vertical axes of the person across views are mapped to the top-view plane and their intersection point on the ground is estimated. To tackle the explosive state space due to multiple targets and views, iterative segmentation-searching is incorporated into a particle filtering framework. By searching for people's ground point locations from segmentations, a set of a few good particles can be identified, resulting in low computational cost. In addition, even if all the particles are away from the true ground point, some of them move towards the true one through the iterated process as long as they are located nearby. We demonstrate the performance of the approach on several video sequences.

title: Equilibria of a class of transport equations arising in congestion control
abstract: This paper studies a class of transport equations arising from stochastic models in congestion control. This class contains two cases of loss models as particular cases: the rate-independent case where the packet loss rate is independent of the throughput of the flow and the rate-dependent case where it depends on it. This class of equations covers both the case of persistent and of non-persistent flows. For the first time, we give a direct proof of the fact that there is a unique density solving the associated differential equation. This density and its mean value are provided as closed form expressions.

title: Iterative kernel principal component analysis for image modeling
abstract: In recent years, kernel principal component analysis (KPCA) has been suggested for various image processing tasks requiring an image model such as, e.g., denoising or compression. The original form of KPCA, however, can be only applied to strongly restricted image classes due to the limited number of training examples that can be processed. We therefore propose a new iterative method for performing KPCA, the kernel Hebbian algorithm, which iteratively estimates the kernel principal components with only linear order memory complexity. In our experiments, we compute models for complex image classes such as faces and natural images which require a large number of training examples. The resulting image models are tested in single-frame super-resolution and denoising applications. The KPCA model is not specifically tailored to these tasks; in fact, the same model can be used in super-resolution with variable input resolution, or denoising with unknown noise characteristics, in spite of this, both super-resolution and denoising performance are comparable to existing methods.