SmartSeer: Using a DHT to Process Continuous Queries Over Peer-to-Peer Networks
As the academic world moves away from physical journals and proceedings towards online document repositories, the ability to efficiently locate work of interest among the torrent of newly-generated papers will become increasingly important. To aid in this endeavor, we designed SmartSeer, a system that allows users to register personalized continuous queries over the CiteSeer database of technical documents. Users are then alerted whenever papers that match their queries are put online. SmartSeer has two main design requirements. First, to allow effective information retrieval, it should support rich continuous queries (as opposed to simple keyword searches). Second, to make effective use of donated infrastructure, it should be capable of running on a loosely maintained group of unreliable machines spread across multiple organizations (as opposed to assuming a reliable and tightly coupled distributed system). Existing work on distributed continuous query systems fails at least one of these requirements. Our design for SmartSeer is based on Distributed Hash Tables (DHTs), and thereby leverages previous work on DHT-based query systems. A prototype of SmartSeer has been implemented and evaluated on Planetlab. Though we evaluate our design only for the SmartSeer application, we believe it also provides useful insights into other distributed and rich continuous query systems (web alerts, news alerts etc).

title: On-Demand Multicast Routing Protocol in Multihop Wireless Mobile Networks
abstract: An ad hoc network is a dynamically reconfigurable wireless network with no fixed infrastructure or central administration. Each host is mobile and must act as a router. Routing and multicasting protocols in ad hoc networks are faced with the challenge of delivering data to destinations through multihop routes in the presence of node movements and topology changes. This paper presents the On-Demand Multicast Routing Protocol (ODMRP) for wireless mobile ad hoc networks. ODMRP is a mesh-based, rather than a conventional tree-based, multicast scheme and uses a forwarding group concept; only a subset of nodes forwards the multicast packets via scoped flooding. It applies on-demand procedures to dynamically build routes and maintain multicast group membership. ODMRP is well suited for ad hoc wireless networks with mobile hosts where bandwidth is limited, topology changes frequently, and power is constrained. We evaluate ODMRP performance with other multicast protocols proposed for ad hoc networks via extensive and detailed simulation.

title: Distributed querying of Internet distance information

title: Improving aggregated channel performance through decentralized channel monitoring
abstract: Aggregating low-speed WAN links into a higher-speed logical link promises to improve data-transfer rates to collaborating communities of wireless mobile multihomed devices. Such bandwidth aggregation systems must adapt to link dynamics as the number of links and the channel conditions vary with time due to mobility, power dissipation, and channel interference. A monitoring architecture that accurately measures the link dynamics and promptly feeds this information to the system is vital to realize significant bandwidth aggregation performance gains. In this paper we present various architectural design alternatives for such a monitoring system, and evaluate them using both analysis and simulation. We show that a properly-designed monitoring system can accurately measure and quickly respond to changes in communication link performance while minimizing the control overhead.

title: Caching strategies in transcoding-enabled proxy systems for streaming media distribution networks
abstract: With the wide availability of high-speed network access, we are experiencing high quality streaming media delivery over the Internet. The emergence of ubiquitous computing enables mobile users to access the Internet with their laptops, PDAs, or even cell phones. When nomadic users connect to the network via wireless links or phone lines, high quality video transfer can be problematic due to long delay or size mismatch between the application display and the screen. Our proposed solution to this problem is to enable network proxies with the transcoding capability, and hence provide different, appropriate video quality to different network environment. The proxies in our transcoding-enabled caching (TeC) system perform transcoding as well as caching for efficient rich media delivery to heterogeneous network users. This design choice allows us to perform content adaptation at the network edges. We propose three different TeC caching strategies. We describe each algorithm and discuss its merits and shortcomings. We also study how the user access pattern affects the performance of TeC caching algorithms and compare them with other approaches. We evaluate TeC performance by conducting two types of simulation. Our first experiment uses synthesized traces while the other uses real traces derived from an enterprise media server logs. The results indicate that compared with the traditional network caches, with marginal transcoding load, TeC improves the cache effectiveness, decreases the user-perceived latency, and reduces the traffic between the proxy and the content origin server.

title: An interactive video delivery and caching system using video summarization
abstract: With the advance of high-speed network technologies, the availability and popularity of streaming media content over the Internet has grown rapidly in recent years. The delivery and caching of streaming media must be handled in a different fashion than that of traditional non-streaming objects such as HTML or image files, because of its distinct characteristics and user viewing patterns. We propose a novel scheme that provides users with the video summary (a number of key-frame images) before they download the file, and options for them to select the starting playback position. We introduce the content analysis service to achieve these functionalities. The video content analysis performs shot boundary detection, key-frame selection, and face detection and tracking. The results of the processing are a segmented video sequence and an XML-based meta-data describing the video content. We also design a caching system that utilizes our video abstraction and summarization technique. Our integrated video delivery and caching system combines content-aware segmentation, prefix caching, prefetching, and cooperative caching. We describe how our scheme can be applied in three proposed caching architectures.

title: A PVS Approach to Verifying ORA-SS Data Models
abstract: The rapid growth of the World Wide Web has resulted in a dramatic increase in semistructured data usage. This creates a growing need for ensuring consistency of the data especially when applications or databases change the schema of semistructured data. In this paper, we demonstrate an approach to formally define and verify the ORA-SS data model for semistructured data design. A mathematical semantics for the ORA-SS notation is defined using the PVS formal language. With this semantics, it is possible to perform automated verification via the PVS theorem prover to identify the inconsistencies in designing ORA-SS data models. The verification is based on criteria for semistructured data ve rification at both schema and data instance levels.

title: Three-Dimensional Volume Reconstruction Based on Trajectory Fusion from Confocal Laser Scanning Microscope Images
abstract: In this paper, we address the problem of 3D volume reconstruction from depth adjacent subvolumes (i.e., sets of image frames) acquired using a confocal laser scanning microscope (CLSM). Our goal is to align sub-volumes by estimating an optimal global image transformation which preserves morphological smoothness of medical structures (called features, e.g., blood vessels) inside of a reconstructed 3D volume. We approached the problem by learning morphological characteristics of structures inside of each sub-volume, i.e. centroid trajectories of features. Next, adjacent sub-volumes are aligned by fusing the morphological characteristics of structures using extrapolation or model fitting. Finally, a global sub-volume to subvolume transformation is computed based on the entire set of fused structures. The trajectory-based 3D volume reconstruction method described here is evaluated with a pair of consecutive physical sections using two evaluation metrics for morphological continu

title: Cooperative peer groups in NICE
abstract: A distributed scheme for trust inference in peer-to-peer networks is presented. Our work is in context of the NICE system, which is a platform for implementing cooperative applications over the Internet. We describe a technique for efficiently storing user reputation information in a completely decentralized manner, and show how this information can be used to efficiently identify noncooperative users in NICE. We present a simulation based study of our algorithms, in which we show our scheme scales to thousands of users using modest amounts of storage, processing, and bandwidth at any individual node. Lastly, we show that our scheme is robust and can form cooperative groups in systems where the vast majority of users are malicious.

title: A hotspot mitigation protocol for ad hoc networks
abstract: Hotspots represent transient but highly congested regions in wireless ad hoc networks that result in increased packet loss, end-to-end delay, and out-of-order packets delivery. We present a simple, effective, and scalable hotspot mitigation protocol (HMP) where mobile nodes independently monitor local buffer occupancy, packet loss, and MAC contention and delay conditions, and take local actions in response to the emergence of hotspots, such as, suppressing new route requests and rate controlling TCP flows. We use analysis, simulation, and experimental results from a wireless testbed to demonstrate the effectiveness of HMP in mobile ad hoc networks. HMP balances resource consumption among neighboring nodes, and improves end-to-end throughput, delay, and packet loss. Our results indicate that HMP can also improve the network connectivity preventing premature network partitions. We present analysis of hotspots, and the detailed design of HMP. We evaluate the protocol’s ability to effectively mitigate hotspots in mobile ad hoc networks that are based on on-demand and proactive routing protocols.

title: Distributed and scalable XML document processing architecture for E-commerce systems
abstract: XML has became a very important emerging standard for E-commerce because of its flexibility and universality. Many software designers are actively developing new systems to handle information in XML formats. We propose a generic architecture for processing XML. We have designed an XML processing system using the latest technologies, such as XML, XSLT (XML Stylesheet Language Transformation), HTTP and Java servlets. Our design is very generic, flexible, scalable, extensible, and also suitable for distributed network environments. A main application of the architecture and the system is to support data exchange in E-commerce systems.