Best-Effort Patching for Multicast True VoD Service

A multicast Video-on-Demand (VoD) system allows clients to share a server stream by batching their requests, and hence, improves channel utilization. However, it is very difficult to equip such a VoD system with full support for interactive VCR functions which are important to a growing number of Internet applications. In order to eliminate service (admission) latency, patching was proposed to enable an existing multicast session to dynamically add new clients, and requests can be served without delay if patching channels are available. A true VoD (TVoD) service should support not only zero-delay client admission but also continuous VCR-like interactivity. However, the conventional patching is only suitable for admission control. We propose a new patching scheme, called Best-Effort Patching (BEP), that offers a TVoD service in terms of both request admission and VCR interactivity. Moreover, by using a novel dynamic merging algorithm, BEP significantly improves the efficiency of TVoD interactivity, especially for popular videos. We also model and evaluate the efficiency of the dynamic merging algorithm. It is shown that BEP outperforms the conventional TVoD interaction protocols.Huadong Ma received the B.S. degree in Mathematics from Henan Normal University in 1984, the M.S. degree in Computer Science from Shenyang Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Science (CAS) in 1990 and the Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from Institute of Computing Technology, CAS, in 1995.He is a Professor with the School of Computer Science & Technology, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, China. He visited UNU/IIST as research fellow in 1998 and 1999, respectively. From 1999 to 2000, he held a visiting position in the Real-Time Computing Laboratory in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, The University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. His current research focuses on multimedia, networking, e-commerce and computergraphics, and he has published over 70papers and 3 books on these fields. He is member of IEEE and ACM.Kang G. Shin received the B.S. degree in Electronics Engineering from Seoul National University, Korea, in 1970, and both the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering from Cornell University, Ithaca, New York in 1976 and 1978, respectively.He is the Kevin and Nancy OConnor Professor of Computer Scienceand Founding Director of the Real-Time Computing Laboratory in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, The University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. His current research focuses on QoS-sensitive networking and computing as well as on embedded real-time OS, middleware and applications, all with emphasis on timeliness and dependability. He has supervised the completion of 49 Ph.D. theses, and authored/coauthored over 600 technical papers and numerous book chapters in the areas of distributed real-time computing and control, computer networking, fault-tolerant computing, and intelligent manufacturing. Dr. Shin is Fellow of IEEE and ACM, and member of the Korean Academy of Engineering.Weibiao Wu received the Ph.D. degree in statistics from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor in 2001. He is currently an Assistant professor of statistics at the University of Chicago. His research interests include probabilistic network modelling and simulation, data-base compression, asymptotic theory and statistical inference of stochastic processes.     

BCL—3：Aigh Performance Basic Communication Protocol for Commodity Superserver DAWNING—3000

This paper introduces the design and implemetation of BCL-3,a high performance low-level communication software running on a cluster of SMPs(CLUMPS) called DAWNING-3000,BCL-3 provides flexible and sufficient functionality to fulfill the communication requirements of fundamental system software developed for DAWNING-3000 while guaranteeing security,scalability,and reliability,Important features of BCL-3 are presented in the paper,including special support for SMP and heterogeneous network environment,semiuser-level communication,reliable and ordered data transfer and scalable flow control,The performance evaluation of BCL-3 over Myrinet is also given.     

Dyanmic Data Prefetching in Home—Based Software DSMs

A major overhead in software DSM(Distributed Shared Memory)is the cost of remote memory accesses necessitated by the protocol as well as induced by false sharing.This paper introduces a dynamic prefetching method implemented in the JIAJIA software DSM to reduce system overhead caused by remote accesses.The prefetching method records the interleaving string of INV(invalidation)and GETP (getting a remote page)operations for each cached page and analyzes the periodicity of the string when a page is invalidated on a lock or barrier.A prefetching request is issued after the lock or barrier if the periodicity analysis indicates that GETP will be the next operation in the string.Multiple prefetching requests are merged into the same message if they are to the same host,Performance evaluation with eight well-accepted benchmarks in a cluster of sixteen PowerPC workstations shows that the prefetching scheme can significantly reduce the page fault overhead and as a result achieves a performance increase of 15%-20% in three benchmarks and around 8%-10% in another three.The average extra traffic caused by useless prefetches is only 7%-13% in the evaluation.     

S-Club: an overlay-based efficient service discovery mechanism in CROWN Grid

Information service plays a key role in grid system, handles resource discovery and management process. Employing existing information service architectures suffers from poor scalability, long search response time, and large traffic overhead. In this paper, we propose a service club mechanism, called S-Club, for efficient service discovery. In S-Club, an overlay based on existing Grid Information Service (GIS) mesh network of CROWN is built, so that GISs are organized as service clubs. Each club serves for a certain type of service while each GIS may join one or more clubs. S-Club is adopted in our CROWN Grid and the performance of S-Club is evaluated by comprehensive simulations. The results show that S-Club scheme significantly improves search performance and outperforms existing approaches. Chunming Hu is a research staff in the Institute of Advanced Computing Technology at the School of Computer Science and Engineering, Beihang University, Beijing, China. He received his B.E. and M.E. in Department of Computer Science and Engineering in Beihang University. He received the Ph.D. degree in School of Computer Science and Engineering of Beihang University, Beijing, China, 2005. His research interests include peer-to-peer and grid computing; distributed systems and software architectures. Yanmin Zhu is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Computer Science, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. He received his B.S. degree in computer science from Xi’an Jiaotong University, Xi’an, China, in 2002. His research interests include grid computing, peer-to-peer networking, pervasive computing and sensor networks. He is a member of the IEEE and the IEEE Computer Society. Jinpeng Huai is a Professor and Vice President of Beihang University. He serves on the Steering Committee for Advanced Computing Technology Subject, the National High-Tech Program (863) as Chief Scientist. He is a member of the Consulting Committee of the Central Government’s Information Office, and Chairman of the Expert Committee in both the National e-Government Engineering Taskforce and the National e-Government Standard office. Dr. Huai and his colleagues are leading the key projects in e-Science of the National Science Foundation of China (NSFC) and Sino-UK. He has authored over 100 papers. His research interests include middleware, peer-to-peer (P2P), grid computing, trustworthiness and security. Yunhao Liu received his B.S. degree in Automation Department from Tsinghua University, China, in 1995, and an M.A. degree in Beijing Foreign Studies University, China, in 1997, and an M.S. and a Ph.D. degree in computer science and engineering at Michigan State University in 2003 and 2004, respectively. He is now an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. His research interests include peer-to-peer computing, pervasive computing, distributed systems, network security, grid computing, and high-speed networking. He is a senior member of the IEEE Computer Society. Lionel M. Ni is chair professor and head of the Computer Science and Engineering Department at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. Lionel M. Ni received the Ph.D. degree in electrical and computer engineering from Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana, in 1980. He was a professor of computer science and engineering at Michigan State University from 1981 to 2003, where he received the Distinguished Faculty Award in 1994. His research interests include parallel architectures, distributed systems, high-speed networks, and pervasive computing. A fellow of the IEEE and the IEEE Computer Society, he has chaired many professional conferences and has received a number of awards for authoring outstanding papers.     

Digital Image Watermarking Based on Discrete Wavelet Transform

This paper aims at digital watermark which is a new popular research topic recently,presents some methods to embed digital watermark based on modifying frequency coefficients in discrete wavelet transform(DWT) domian,Fist,the,the present progress of digital watermark is briefly introduced;after that,starting from Pitas‘s method and discarding his pseudo random number method,the authors use a digital image scrambling technology as preprocessing for digital watermarking ,Then the authors discuss how to embed a 1-bit digital image as watermark in frequency domain.Finally another digital watermarking method is given in which3-D DWT is used to transform a given digtial image .Based on the experimental results ,it is shown that the proposed methods are robust to a large extent.     

An Efficient VLSI Architecture for Motion Compensation of AVS HDTV Decoder

In the part 2 of advanced Audio Video coding Standard （AVS-P2）, many efficient coding tools are adopted in motion compensation, such as new motion vector prediction, symmetric matching, quarter precision interpolation, etc. However, these new features enormously increase the computational complexity and the memory bandwidth requirement, which make motion compensation a difficult component in the implementation of the AVS HDTV decoder. This paper proposes an efficient motion compensation architecture for AVS-P2 video standard up to the Level 6.2 of the Jizhun Profile. It has a macroblock-level pipelined structure which consists of MV predictor unit, reference fetch unit and pixel interpolation unit. The proposed architecture exploits the parallelism in the AVS motion compensation algorithm to accelerate the speed of operations and uses the dedicated design to optimize the memory access. And it has been integrated in a prototype chip which is fabricated with TSMC 0.18-#m CMOS technology, and the experimental results show that this architecture can achieve the real time AVS-P2 decoding for the HDTV 1080i （1920 - 1088 4 ： 2 ： 0 60field/s） video. The efficient design can work at the frequency of 148.5MHz and the total gate count is about 225K.     

ARMiner: A Data Mining Tool Based on Association Rules

In this paper,ARM iner,a data mining tool based on association rules,is introduced.Beginning with the system architecture,the characteristics and functions are discussed in details,including data transfer,concept hierarchy generalization,mining rules with negative items and the re-development of the system.An example of the tool‘s application is also shown.Finally,Some issues for future research are presented.     

Efficient minimum spanning tree algorithms on the reconfigurable mesh

1 IntroductionLet G = (V, E) be a connected, undirected graph with a weight function W on the set Eof edges to the set of reals. A spanning tree is a subgraph T = (V, ET), ET G E, of C suchthat T is a tree. The weight W(T) of a spanning tree T is the sum of the weights of its edges.A spanning tree with the smallest possible'weight is called a minimum spanning tree (MST)of G. Computing an MST of a given weighted graph is an important problem that arisesin many applications. For this …     

New Meta-Heuristic for Combinatorial Optimization Problems: Intersection Based Scaling

Combinatorial optimization problems are found in many application fields such as computer science,engineering and economy. In this paper, a new efficient meta-heuristic, Intersection-Based Scaling (IBS for abbreviation), is proposed and it can be applied to the combinatorial optimization problems. The main idea of IBS is to scale the size of the instance based on the intersection of some local optima, and to simplify the search space by extracting the intersection from the instance, which makes the search more efficient. The combination of IBS with some local search heuristics of different combinatorial optimization problems such as Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP) and Graph Partitioning Problem (GPP) is studied, and comparisons are made with some of the best heuristic algorithms and meta-heuristic algorithms. It is found that it has significantly improved the performance of existing local search heuristics and significantly outperforms the known best algorithms.     

Test Resource Partitioning Based on Efficient Response Compaction for Test Time and Tester Channels Reduction

This paper presents a test resource partitioning technique based on an efficient response compaction design called quotient compactor(q-Compactor). Because q-Compactor is a single-output compactor, high compaction ratios can be obtained even for chips with a small number of outputs. Some theorems for the design of q-Compactor are presented to achieve full diagnostic ability, minimize error cancellation and handle unknown bits in the outputs of the circuit under test (CUT). The q-Compactor can also be moved to the load-board, so as to compact the output response of the CUT even during functional testing. Therefore, the number of tester channels required to test the chip is significantly reduced. The experimental results on the ISCAS ‘89 benchmark circuits and an MPEG 2 decoder SoC show that the proposed compactionscheme is very efficient.     

Efficient mining of association rules by reducing the number of passes over the database

This paper introduces a new algorithm of mining association rules.The algorithm RP counts the itemsets with different sizes in the same pass of scanning over the database by dividing the database into m partitions.The total number of pa sses over the database is only(k 2m-2)/m,where k is the longest size in the itemsets.It is much less than k .     

A Novel Computer Architecture to Prevent Destruction by Viruses

In today‘s Internet computing world,illegal activities by crackers pose a serious threat to computer security.It is well known that computer viruses,Trojan horses and other intrusive programs may cause sever and often catastrophic consequences. This paper proposes a novel secure computer architecture based on security-code.Every instruction/data word is added with a security-code denoting its security level.External programs and data are automatically addoed with security-code by hadware when entering a computer system.Instruction with lower security-code cannot run or process instruction/data with higher security level.Security-code cannot be modified by normal instruction.With minor hardware overhead,then new architecture can effectively protect the main computer system from destruction or theft by intrusive programs such as computer viruses.For most PC systems it includes an increase of word-length by 1 bit on register,the memory and the hard disk.     

Ontology-Based Semantic Cache in AOKB

When querying on a large-scale knowledge base,a major technique of improving performance is to preload knowledge to minimize the number of roundtrips to the knowledge base.In this paper,an ontology-based semantic cache is proposed for an agent and ontology-oriented knowledge base (AOKB).In AOKB,an ontology is the collection of relationships between a group of knowledge units (agents and/or other sub-ontologies).When loading some agent A,its relationships with other knowledge units are examined,and those who have a tight semantic tie with A will be preloaded at the same time,including agents and sub-ontologies in the same ontology where A is.The proloaded agents and ontologies are saved at a semantic cache located in the memory.Test results show that up to 50% reduction in running time is achieved.     

A Transactional Asynchronous Replication Scheme for Mobile Database Systems

In mobile database systems,mobility of users has a significant impact on data replication.As a result,the various replica control protocols that exist today in traditional distributed and multidatabase environments are no longer suitable To solve this problem,a new mobile database replication scheme,the Transaction-Level Result-Set Propagation(TLRSP)model,is put forward in this paper,The conflict dectction and resolution strategy based on TLRSP is discussed in detail,and the implementation algorithm is proposed,In order to compare the performance of the TLRSP model with that of other mobile replication schemes,we have developed a detailde simulation model.Experimantal results show that the TLRSP model provides an effcient support for replicated mobile database systems by reducing reprocessing overhead and maintaining database consistency.     

Automatic Segmentation of News Items Based on Video and Audio Features

The automatic segmentation of news items is a key for implementing the automatic cataloging system of news video.This paper presents an approach which manages audio and video feature infomation to automatically segment news items.The integration of audio and visual analyses can overcome the weakness of the approach using only image analysis techniques.It makes the approach more adaptable to various situations of news items.The proposed approach detects silence segments in accompanying audio,and integrates them with shot segmentation results,as ewll as anchor shot detection results,to determine the boundaries among news items,Expeimental results show that the integration of audio and video features is an effective approach to solving the problem of automatic segmentation of news items.     

Behavioural notions for elementary net systems

We study the relationships between a number of behavioural notions that have arisen in the theory of distributed computing. In order to sharpen the under-standing of these relationships we apply the chosen behavioural notions to a basic net-theoretic model of distributed systems called elementary net systems. The behavioural notions that are considered here are trace languages, non-sequential processes, unfoldings and event structures. The relationships between these notions are brought out in the process of establishing that for each elementary net system, the trace language representation of its behaviour agrees in a strong way with the event structure representation of its behaviour. M. Nielsen received a Master of Science degree in mathematics and computer science in 1973, and a Ph.D. degree in computer science in 1976 both from Aarhus University, Denmark. He has held academic positions at Department of Computer Science, Aarhus University, Denmark since 1976, and was visiting researcher at Computer Science Department, University of Edinburgh, U.K., 1977–79, and Computer Laboratory, Cambridge University, U.K., 1986. His research interest is in the theory of distributed computing. Grzegorz Rozenberg received a master of engineering degree from the Department of Electronics (section computers) of the Technical University of Warsaw in 1964 and a Ph.D. in mathematics from the Institute of Mathematics of the Polish Academy of Science in 1968. He has held acdeemic positions at the Institute of Mathematics of the Polish Academy of Science, the Department of Mathematics of Utrecht University, the Department of Computer Science at SUNY at Buffalo, and the Department of Mathematics of the University of Antwerp. He is currently Professor at the Department of Computer Science of Leiden University and Adjoint Professor at the Department of Computer Science of the University of Colorado at Boulder. His research interests include formal languages and automata theory, theory of graph transformations, and theory of concurrent systems. He is currently President of the European Association for Theoretical Computer Science (EATCS). P.S. Thiagarajan received the Bachelor of Technology degree from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, India in 1970. He was awarded the Ph.D. degree by Rice University, Houston Texas, U.S.A, in 1973. He has been a Research Associate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge a Staff Scientist at the Geosellschaft für Mathematik und Datenverarbeitung, St. Augustin, a Lektor at Århus University, Århus and an Associate Professor at the Institute of Mathematical Sciences, Madras. He is currently a Professor at the School of Mathematics, SPIC Science Foundation, Madras. He research intest is in the theory of distributed computing.     

Privacy preservation for data cubes

A range query finds the aggregated values over all selected cells of an online analytical processing (OLAP) data cube where the selection is specified by the ranges of contiguous values for each dimension. An important issue in reality is how to preserve the confidential information in individual data cells while still providing an accurate estimation of the original aggregated values for range queries. In this paper, we propose an effective solution, called the zero-sum method, to this problem. We derive theoretical formulas to analyse the performance of our method. Empirical experiments are also carried out by using analytical processing benchmark (APB) dataset from the OLAP Council. Various parameters, such as the privacy factor and the accuracy factor, have been considered and tested in the experiments. Finally, our experimental results show that there is a trade-off between privacy preservation and range query accuracy, and the zero-sum method has fulfilled three design goals: security, accuracy, and accessibility. Sam Y. Sung is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science, School of Computing, National University of Singapore. He received a B.Sc. from the National Taiwan University in 1973, the M.Sc. and Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Minnesota in 1977 and 1983, respectively. He was with the University of Oklahoma and University of Memphis in the United States before joining the National University of Singapore. His research interests include information retrieval, data mining, pictorial databases and mobile computing. He has published more than 80 papers in various conferences and journals, including IEEE Transaction on Software Engineering, IEEE Transaction on Knowledge & Data Engineering, etc. Yao Liu received the B.E. degree in computer science and technology from Peking University in 1996 and the MS. degree from the Software Institute of the Chinese Science Academy in 1999. Currently, she is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Computer Science at the National University of Singapore. Her research interests include data warehousing, database security, data mining and high-speed networking. Hui Xiong received the B.E. degree in Automation from the University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, China, in 1995, the M.S. degree in Computer Science from the National University of Singapore, Singapore, in 2000, and the Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN, USA, in 2005. He is currently an Assistant Professor of Computer Information Systems in the Management Science & Information Systems Department at Rutgers University, NJ, USA. His research interests include data mining, databases, and statistical computing with applications in bioinformatics, database security, and self-managing systems. He is a member of the IEEE Computer Society and the ACM. Peter A. Ng is currently the Chairperson and Professor of Computer Science at the University of Texas—Pan American. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Texas–Austin in 1974. Previously, he had served as the Vice President at the Fudan International Institute for Information Science and Technology, Shanghai, China, from 1999 to 2002, and the Executive Director for the Global e-Learning Project at the University of Nebraska at Omaha, 2000–2003. He was appointed as an Advisory Professor of Computer Science at Fudan University, Shanghai, China in 1999. His recent research focuses on document and information-based processing, retrieval and management. He has published many journal and conference articles in this area. He had served as the Editor-in-Chief for the Journal on Systems Integration (1991–2001) and as Advisory Editor for the Data and Knowledge Engineering Journal since 1989.     

Blending parametric patches with subdivision surfaces

In this paper the problem of blending parametric surfaces using subdivision patches is discussed.A new approach,named removing-boundary,is presented to generate piecewise-smooth subdivision surfaces through discarding the outmost quadrilaterals of the open meshes derived by each subdivision step.Then the approach is employed both to blend parametric bicubic B-spline surfaces and to fill n-sided holes.It is easy to produce piecewise-smooth subdivision surfaces with both convex and concave corners on the boundary,and limit surfaces are guaranteed to be C^2 continuous on the boundaries except for a few singular points by the removing-boundary approach Thus the blending method is very efficient and the blending surface generated is of good effect.     

Preference update for e-commerce applications: Model,language, and processing

It is likely that customers issue requests based on out-of-date information in e-commerce application systems. Hence, the transaction failure rates would increase greatly. In this paper, we present a preference update model to address this problem. A preference update is an extended SQL update statement where a user can request the desired number of target data items by specifying multiple preferences. Moreover, the preference update allows easy extraction of criteria from a set of concurrent requests and, hence, optimal decisions for the data assignments can be made. We propose a group evaluation strategy for preference update processing in a multidatabase environment. The experimental results show that the group evaluation can effectively increase the customer satisfaction level with acceptable cost. Peng Li is the Chief Software Architect of didiom LLC. Before that, he was a visiting assistant professor of computer science department in Western Kentucky University. He received his Ph.D. degree of computer science from the University of Texas at Dallas. He also holds a B.Sc. and M.S. in Computer Science from the Renmin University of China. His research interests include database systems, database security, transaction processing, distributed and Internet computer and E-commerce. Manghui Tu received a Bachelor degree of Science from Wuhan University, P.R. China in 1996, and a Master Degree in Computer Science from the University of Texas at Dallas 2001. He is currently working toward the PhD degree in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Texas at Dallas. Mr. Tu’s research interests include distributed systems, grid computing, information security, mobile computing, and scientific computing. His PhD research work focus on the data management in secure and high performance data grid. He is a student member of the IEEE. I-Ling Yen received her BS degree from Tsing-Hua University, Taiwan, and her MS and PhD degrees in Computer Science from the University of Houston. She is currently an Associate Professor of Computer Science at the University of Texas at Dallas. Dr. Yen’s research interests include fault-tolerant computing, security systems and algorithms, distributed systems, Internet technologies, E-commerce, and self-stabilizing systems. She had published over 100 technical papers in these research areas and received many research awards from NSF, DOD, NASA, and several industry companies. She has served as Program Committee member for many conferences and Program Chair/Co-Chair for the IEEE Symposium on Application-Specific Software and System Engineering & Technology, IEEE High Assurance Systems Engineering Symposium, IEEE International Computer Software and Applications Conference, and IEEE International Symposium on Autonomous Decentralized Systems. She is a member of the IEEE. Zhonghang Xia received the B.S. degree in applied mathematics from Dalian University of Technology in 1990, the M.S. degree in Operations Research from Qufu Normal University in 1993, and the Ph.D. degree in computer science from the University of Texas at Dallas in 2004. He is now an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science, Western Kentucky University, Bowling Green, KY. His research interests are in the area of multimedia computing and networking, distributed systems, and data mining.