An efficient hybrid multicast transport protocol for collaborative virtual environment with networked haptic

In recent years, we have witnessed a growing interest in the synchronous collaboration based class of applications. Several techniques for collaborative virtual environments (CVE), haptic, audio and visual environments (C-HAVE) have been designed. However, several challenging issues remain to be resolved before CVE and C-HAVE become a common place. In this paper, we focus on applications that are based on closely coupled and highly synchronized haptic tasks that require a high-level of coordination among the participants. Four main protocols have been designed to resolve the synchronization issues in such environments: the synchronous collaboration transport protocol, the selective reliable transmission protocol, the reliable multicast transport protocol and the scalable reliable multicast. While these four protocols have shown good performance for CVE and C-HAVE class of applications, none of these protocols has been able to meet all of the basic CVE requirements, i.e., scalability, reliability, synchronization, and minimum delay. In this paper, we present a hybrid protocol that is able to satisfy all of the CVE and C-HAVE requirements and discuss its implementation and results in two tele-surgery applications. This work is partially supported by Grants from Canada Research Chair Program, NSERC, OIT/Ontario Distinguished Researcher Award, Early Research Award and ORNEC Research Grant.     

Direction-based adaptive data propagation for heterogeneous sensor mobility

We consider sensor networks where the sensor nodes are attached on entities that move in a highly dynamic, heterogeneous manner. To capture this mobility diversity we introduce a new network parameter, the direction-aware mobility level, which measures how fast and close each mobile node is expected to get to the data destination (the sink). We then provide local, distributed data dissemination protocols that adaptively exploit the node mobility to improve performance. In particular, “high” mobility is used as a low cost replacement for data dissemination (due to the ferrying of data), while in the case of “low” mobility either (a) data propagation redundancy is increased (when highly mobile neighbors exist) or (b) long-distance data transmissions are used (when the entire neighborhood is of low mobility) to accelerate data dissemination toward the sink. An extensive performance comparison to relevant methods from the state of the art demonstrates significant improvements, i.e. latency is reduced by even four times while keeping energy dissipation and delivery success at very satisfactory levels.     

A Multichannel QoS MAC with Dynamic Transmit Opportunity for VANets

One of the most challenging issues facing vehicular networks lies in the design of an efficient MAC protocol due to the mobile nature of nodes and the interference associated with the dynamic environment. Moreover delay constraints for safety applications add complexity and latency requirements to the design. Existing MAC protocols overcome some challenges however don’t provide an integrated solution. Hence, the merit if this work lies in designing an efficient MAC protocol that incorporates various VANet’s challenges in a complete end-to-end solution. In this work, we propose an efficient Multichannel QoS Cognitive MAC (MQOG). MQOG assesses the quality of channel prior to transmission employing dynamic channel allocation and negotiation algorithms to achieve significant increase in channel reliability, throughput and delay constraints while simultaneously addressing Quality of Service. The uniqueness of MQOG lies in making use of the free unlicensed bands. The proposed protocols were implemented in OMNET++ 4.1, and extensive experiments demonstrated a faster and more efficient reception of safety messages compared to existing VANet MAC Protocols. Finally, improvements in delay, packet delivery ratios and throughput were captured.     

Scalability and Performance Evaluation of DDM-Based Aggregation/Dissaggregation Protocols for Large-Scale Distributed Interactive Simulations Systems

Aggregation/disaggregation is a method for implementing multi-resolution simulations within a High Level Architecture (HLA) federation. HLA is a U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) developed standard to facilitate linking different types of simulations, in various locations, to form an or interactive, full-scale simulation, called a federation. Data Distribution Management (DDM) is a High Level Architecture/Run-time Infrastructure (HLA/RTI) service that manages the distribution of state updates and interaction information and controls the volume of data exchanged, in large-scale distributed simulations. The purpose of HLA is to promote interoperability and reuse among heterogenous simulations, including those simulations that offer varied levels of resolution, to provide practical training to military personnel of different ranks. The purpose of Aggregation/disaggregation is to ensure consistency in state updates between federates simulating objects at various levels of resolution. This paper focuses on the scalability of aggregation/disaggregation with different DDM implementations and examines the effects, on performance of large-scale simulations. We implement a federate-based aggregation/disaggregation scheme, originally introduced in [TAN01], with a tank dogfight scenario, aggregating five tanks into one tank battalion and disaggregating the battalion back into five individual entities (tanks). The DDM methods we analyze consist of the Fixed Grid-Based method, the Dynamic Grid-Based method and the Region-Based method. In [TAN01], testing of this federate-based aggregation/disaggregation was limited to a dual federation and a single DDM scheme. In an effort to determine the scalability of aggregation/disaggregation, with three methods of DDM, we measure the communication overhead and analyze performance during a federation execution. We present the results of extensive testing, varying the number of aggregation/disaggregation requests, the number of multi-resolution federates participating in the federation, the number of objects, the number/size of the grids and report on the performance evlauation of our protocols using an extensive set of simulation experiments. This work was partially supported by Grants from NSERC, Canada Research Chairs Program, Canada Foundation for Innovation, OIT/Distinguished Researcher Award.     

An efficient synchronization scheme of multimedia streams in wireless and mobile systems

Recent advances in mobile computing and distributed multimedia systems allow mobile hosts (clients) to access wireless multimedia systems anywhere and at anytime, but not without creating a new set of issues and trade-offs. To the best of our knowledge, there has been very little research in dealing with the synchronization problem in wireless and mobile multimedia systems. In this paper, we propose an efficient distributed synchronization algorithm using quasi-sink for wireless and mobile multimedia systems to ensure and facilitate mobile client access to multimedia objects. We discuss the algorithm and provide its proof of correctness. We also present a set of simulation experiments to evaluate the performance of our scheme using message complexity and buffer usage at each frame arrival time. Our results indicate that our scheme exhibits a significant low message complexity and no underflow and overflow within the bounded delivery time.     

Multiple biological sequence alignment in heterogeneous multicore clusters with user-selectable task allocation policies

Multiple Sequence Alignment (MSA) is an important problem in Bioinformatics that aims to align more than two sequences in order to emphasize similarity regions. This problem is known to be NP-Hard, so heuristic methods are used to solve it. DIALIGN-TX is an iterative heuristic method for MSA that generates alignments by concatenating ungapped regions with high similarity. Usually, the first phase of MSA algorithms is parallelized by distributing several independent tasks among the nodes. Even though heterogeneous multicore clusters are becoming very common nowadays, very few task allocation policies were proposed for this type of architecture. This paper proposes an MPI/OpenMP master/slave parallel strategy to run DIALIGN-TX in heterogeneous multicore clusters, with several allocation policies. We show that an appropriate choice of the master node has great impact on the overall system performance. Also, the results obtained in a heterogeneous multicore cluster composed of 4 nodes (30 cores), with real sequence sets show that the execution time can be drastically reduced when the appropriate allocation policy is used.     

Performance analysis of a novel hybrid push–pull algorithm with QoS adaptations in wireless networks

In this paper, we present a novel hybrid push–pull algorithm which combines broadcasting of push data items, with dissemination upon request of pull items in asymmetric communication environments. These environments are made up only of one database server and many clients. Requests made by the clients are queued up for the pull items. The (pull) item with the number of pending requests is the one selected to be pulled. We present a performance analysis of our scheme, and determine the individual response time for each item disseminated and the overall time for the pull queue to be flushed. Next, we extend our algorithm by incorporating quality of service (QoS) factors, and then, study its performance analytically.     

Parallel simulation on the hypercube multiprocessor

Summary This paper focuses upon a particular conservative algorithm for parallel simulation, the Time of Next Event (TNE) suite of algorithms [13]. TNE relies upon a shortest path algorithm which is independently executed on each processor in order to unblock LPs in the processor and to increase the parallelism of the simulation. TNE differs fundamentally from other conservative approaches in that it takes advantage of having several LPs assigned to each processor, and does not rely upon message passing to provide lookahead. Instead, it relies upon a shortest path algorithm executed independently in each processor. A deadlock resolution algorithm is employed for interprocessor deadlocks. We describe an empirical investigation of the performance of TNE on the iPSC/i860 hypercube multiprocessor. Several factors which play an important role in TNE's behavior are identified, and the speedup relative to a fast uniprocessor-based event list algorithm is reported. Our results indicate that TNE yields good speedups and out-performs an optimized version of the Chandy&Misra-null message (CMB) algorithm. TNE was 2–5 times as fast as the CM approach for less than 10 processors (and 1.5–3 times as fast when more than 10 processors were used for the same population of processes.) Azzedine Boukerche received the State Engineer degree in Software Engineering from Oran University, Oran, Algeria, and the M.Sc. degree in Computer Science from McGill University, Montreal, Canada. He is a Ph.D. candidate at the School of Computer Science, McGill University. During 1991–1992, he was a visiting doctoral student at the California Institute of Technology. He is employed as a Faculty Lecturer of computer Science at McGill University since 1993. His research interests include parallel simulation, distributed algorithms, and system performance analysis. He is a student member of the IEEE and ACM. Carl Tropper is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at McGill University. His primary area of research is parallel discrete event simulation. His general area of interest is in parallel computing and distributed algorithms in particular. Previously, he has done research in the performance modeling of computer networks, having written a book,Local Computer Network Technologies, while active in the area. Before coming to university life, he worked for the BBN Corporation and the Mitre Corporation, both located in the Boston area. He spent the 1991–92 academic year on a sabbatical leave at the Jet Propulsion Laboratories of the California Institute of Technology where he contributed to a project centered about the verification of flight control software. As part of this project he developed algorithms for the parallel simulation of communicating finite state machines. During winters he may be found hurtling down mountains on skis.This work has been completed while the author was a visiting doctoral student at the California Institute of TechnologyWas on sabbatical leave at the Jet Propulsion laboratories, California Institute of Technology