Performing work in broadcast networks

We consider the problem of how to schedule t similar and independent tasks to be performed in a synchronous distributed system of p stations communicating via multiple-access channels. Stations are prone to crashes whose patterns of occurrence are specified by adversarial models. Work, defined as the number of the available processor steps, is the complexity measure. We consider only reliable algorithms that perform all the tasks as long as at least one station remains operational. It is shown that every reliable algorithm has to perform work Ω(t+p√t) even when no failures occur. An optimal deterministic algorithm for the channel with collision detection is developed, which performs work (t+p√t). Another algorithm, for the channel without collision detection, performs work (t+p √t+ p min {f,t}), where f < p is the number of failures. This algorithm is proved to be optimal, provided that the adversary is restricted in failing no more than f stations. Finally, we consider the question if randomization helps against weaker adversaries for the channel without collision detection. A randomized algorithm is developed which performs the expected minimum amount (t+p√t) of work, provided that the adversary may fail a constant fraction of stations and it has to select failure-prone stations prior to the start of an execution of the algorithm. The work of the first author is supported by the NSF Grant 0310503. A preliminary version of this paper appeared as “The do-all problem in broadcast networks,” in Proceedings, 20th ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing, Newport, Rhode Island, 2001, pp. 117–126.     

Query optimization for broadcast database

In a mobile environment, the broadcast paradigm has been recognized as an effective way to disseminate frequently requested information to multiple ‘mobile clients’. In this paper, we show that to query the broadcast database efficiently, database items must be organized over the broadcast channel in a meaningful way, reflecting the semantics of the database being broadcast. We define, for the first time, a cost model called the Semantic Ordering Model for identifying the optimal organization of database items over the broadcast channel. Experimental results are also delineated to illustrate the feasibility of our cost model, using relational and object-oriented databases as examples.     

Low-latency atomic broadcast in the presence of contention

The Atomic Broadcast algorithm described in this paper can deliver messages in two communication steps, even if multiple processes broadcast at the same time. It tags all broadcast messages with the local real time, and delivers all messages in the order of these timestamps. Both positive and negative statements are used: “m broadcast at time 51” vs. “no messages broadcast between times 31 and 51”. To prevent crashed processes from blocking the system, the -elected leader broadcasts negative statements on behalf of the processes it suspects () to have crashed. A new cheap Generic Broadcast algorithm is used to ensure consistency between conflicting statements. It requires only a majority of correct processes (n > 2f) and, in failure-free runs, delivers all non-conflicting messages in two steps. The main algorithm satisfies several new lower bounds, which are proved in this paper.     

Maintaining mobile transactional consistency in hybrid broadcast environments

Recently there have been attempts in several research areas at efficiently utilizing the resources of mobile computers. Considering the properties in mobile computing environments, push-based data dissemination systems have lately attracted considerable attention. However, skewed access patterns among mobile clients makes response time worse, and they prefer to send data requests to the server explicitly through an uplink channel. A broadcast supporting an uplink channel is called a hybrid broadcast. In this paper, we devise new transaction processing algorithms for hybrid broadcasts. It is assumed that data objects that the server maintains are divided into Push_Data for periodic broadcasting and Pull_Data for on-demand service. That is, clients have to explicitly request data objects in Pull_Data. Maintaining transactional consistency in this environment without much additional cost is our main concern. Finally, we evaluate performance behavior through simulation study.Received: 15 November 2002, Published online: 5 August 2004This work was done as part of the Information & Communication Fundamental Technology Research Program, supported by the Ministry of Information & Communication in the Republic of Korea.     

Adaptive broadcast by fault-tolerant spanning tree switching

Adaptation is a desirable requirement in a distributed system as it helps the system to perform efficiently under different environments. For many problems, more than one protocol exists, such that one protocol performs better in one environment while the other performs better in another. In such cases, adaptive distributed systems can be designed by dynamically switching between the protocols as the environment changes. Distributed protocol switching is also important for performance enhancement, or fault-tolerance of a distributed system. In this work, we illustrate distributed protocol switching by providing a distributed algorithm for adaptive broadcast that dynamically switches from a BFS tree to a DFS tree. The proposed switching algorithm can also handle arbitrary crash failures. It ensures that switching eventually terminates in spite of failures and the desired tree (DFS tree) results as the output. We also investigate the properties that can be guaranteed on the delivery of broadcast messages under specific failure conditions. We show that under no failure, each broadcast message is eventually correctly delivered to all the nodes in spite of switching. Under arbitrary crash fault, we ensure that switching eventually terminates with the desired tree as the broadcast topology. We also investigate the specific delivery guarantees that can be provided when a single crash fault happens, both during switching and when no switching is in progress.     

Necessary and sufficient conditions for broadcast consensus protocols

Summary We consider consensus protocols in asynchronous distributed systems that are based on broadcast communication. We show that a necessary and sufficient condition for the existence of a deterministic consensus protocol is delivery of each broadcast message to at least (n+k+1)/2 processes in ann-process system subject tok crash failures with either eventual fair broadcasting or eventual full broadcasting. The broadcast model captures the idea of a broadcast communication medium, such as the Ethernet, in which messages, if delivered, are delivered immediately and in order but not necessarily to all processes. Louise E. Moser received the Ph.D. degree in mathematics from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, in 1970. From 1970 to 1987 she was a professor of mathematics and computer science at California State University, Hayward. In 1987 she moved to the University of California, Santa Barbara, where is currently on the faculty of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. Her current research interests include parallel and distributed systems, network architectures and communication protocols, and formal methods in software engineering. P.M. Melliar-Smith received the Ph.D. degree in computer science from the University of Cambridge, Cambridge, England, in 1987. He was a senior research scientist and program director at SRI International in Menlo Park (1976–1987), senior research associate at the University of Newcastle Upon Tyne (1973–1976), and principal designer for GEC Computers Ltd. in England (1964–1973). He is currently a professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His research interests include fault-tolerant distributed systems, high-speed communication networks and protocols, and formal specification and verification. Vivek Agrawala received the B.Tech. degree in chemical engineering in 1984 and the M. Tech. degree in computer technology in 1986, both from the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi, and a Ph.D. in computer science in 1991 from the University of California, Santa Barbara. Since then he has been a Research Scientist at Siemens Corporate Research, Princeton, New Jersey. His major research interests are distributed algorithms, software design methods, and distributed systems.This research was supported by the National Science Foundation, Grant Numbers CCR-8908515 and NCR-9016361. V. Agrawala's current address is Siemens Corporate Research, 755 College Road East, Princeton, NJ 08540, USA     

Lower bounds for the broadcast problem in mobile radio networks

Summary.  In this paper, we prove a lower bound on the number of rounds required by a deterministic distributed protocol for broadcasting a message in radio networks whose processors do not know the identities of their neighbors. Such an assumption captures the main characteristic of mobile and wireless environments [3], i.e., the instability of the network topology. For any distributed broadcast protocol Π, for any n and for any D≦n/2, we exhibit a network G with n nodes and diameter D such that the number of rounds needed by Π for broadcasting a message in G is Ω(D log n). The result still holds even if the processors in the network use a different program and know n and D. We also consider the version of the broadcast problem in which an arbitrary number of processors issue at the same time an identical message that has to be delivered to the other processors. In such a case we prove that, even assuming that the processors know the network topology, Ω(n) rounds are required for solving the problem on a complete network (D=1) with n processors. Received: August 1994 / Accepted: August 1996     

An efficient nonuniform index in the wireless broadcast environments

Data broadcast is an efficient dissemination method to deliver information to mobile clients through the wireless channel. It allows a huge number of the mobile clients simultaneously access data in the wireless environments. In real-life applications, more popular data may be frequently accessed by clients than less popular ones. Under such scenarios, Acharya et al.’s Broadcast Disks algorithm (BD) allocates more popular data appeared more times in a broadcast period than less popular ones, i.e., the nonuniform broadcast, and provides a good performance on reducing client waiting time. However, mobile devices should constantly tune in to the wireless broadcast channel to examine data, consuming a lot of energy. Using index technologies on the broadcast file can reduce a lot of energy consumption of the mobile devices without significantly increasing client waiting time. In this paper, we propose an efficient nonuniform index called the skewed index, SI, over BD. The proposed algorithm builds an index tree according to skewed access patterns of clients, and allocates index nodes for the popular data more times than those for the less popular ones in a broadcast cycle. From our experimental study, we have shown that our proposed algorithm outperforms the flexible index and the flexible distributed index.     

Fully CCA2 secure identity based broadcast encryption without random oracles

In broadcast encryption schemes, a broadcaster encrypts messages and transmits them to some subset S of users who are listening to a broadcast channel. Any user in S can use his private key to decrypt the broadcast. An identity based cryptosystem is a public key cryptosystem where the public key can be represented as an arbitrary string. In this paper, we propose the first identity based broadcast encryption (IBBE) scheme that is IND-ID-CCA2 secure without random oracles. The public key and ciphertext are constant size, and the private key size is linear in the total number of receivers. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first IBBE scheme that is fully CCA2 secure without random oracles. Moreover, our IBBE scheme is collusion resistant for arbitrarily large collusion of users.     

An efficient stream structure for broadcasting the encrypted XML data in mobile wireless broadcast channels

In mobile wireless broadcast networks, XML data is encrypted before it is sent over the broadcast channel in order to ensure the confidentiality of XML data. In these networks, mobile clients must not have access to all the XML data; rather they should have access to some parts of the XML data that are relevant to them and to which they are authorized to have access. In this paper, a new encrypted XML data stream structure is proposed which supports the confidentiality of XML data over the broadcast channel. In our proposed stream structure, the size of encrypted XML data stream is reduced by grouping the paths, XML nodes, texts, and attributes together. The proposed structure includes several indexes to skip from irrelevant data over the broadcast channel. The experimental results demonstrate that the use of our proposed stream structure efficiently disseminates XML data in mobile wireless broadcast networks in a secure manner and the indexes in our proposed stream structure improve the performance of XML query processing over the encrypted XML data stream.

     

Hadamard quantum broadcast channels

We consider three different communication tasks for quantum broadcast channels, and we determine the capacity region of a Hadamard broadcast channel for these various tasks. We define a Hadamard broadcast channel to be such that the channel from the sender to one of the receivers is entanglement-breaking and the channel from the sender to the other receiver is complementary to this one. As such, this channel is a quantum generalization of a degraded broadcast channel, which is well known in classical information theory. The first communication task we consider is classical communication to both receivers, the second is quantum communication to the stronger receiver and classical communication to other, and the third is entanglement-assisted classical communication to the stronger receiver and unassisted classical communication to the other. The structure of a Hadamard broadcast channel plays a critical role in our analysis: The channel to the weaker receiver can be simulated by performing a measurement channel on the stronger receiver’s system, followed by a preparation channel. As such, we can incorporate the classical output of the measurement channel as an auxiliary variable and solve all three of the above capacities for Hadamard broadcast channels, in this way avoiding known difficulties associated with quantum auxiliary variables.     

An enhanced client-centric approach for efficient video broadcast

Periodic broadcast is a cost-effective solution for large-scale distribution of popular videos. Regardless of the number of video requests, this strategy guarantees a constant worst service latency to all clients, making it possible to serve a large community with a minimal amount of broadcast bandwidth. Although many efficient periodic broadcast techniques have been proposed, most of them impose rigid requirements on client receiving bandwidth. They either demand clients to have the same bandwidth as the video server, or limit them to receive no more than two video streams at any one time. In our previous work, we addressed this problem with a Client-Centric Approach (CCA). This scheme takes into consideration both server broadcast bandwidth and client receiving bandwidth and allows clients to use all their receiving capability for prefetching broadcast data. As a result, given a fixed broadcast bandwidth, a shorter broadcast period can be achieved with an improved client communication capability. In this paper, we present an enhanced version of CCA to further leverage client bandwidth for more efficient video broadcast. The new scheme reduces the broadcast latency up to 50% as compared to CCA. We prove the correctness of this new technique and provide an analytical evaluation to show its performance advantage as compared with some existing techniques.

A fault-tolerant protocol for atomic broadcast

A general protocol for atomic broadcast in networks is presented. The protocol tolerates loss, duplication, reordering, delay of messages, and network partitioning in an arbitrary network of fail-stop sites (i.e. no Byzantine site behavior is tolerated). The protocol is based on majority-concensus decisions to commit on unique ordering of received broadcast messages. Under normal operating conditions, the protocol requires three phases to complete and approximately 4N/V messages where N is the number of sites. This overhead is distributed among the messages of which the delivery decision is made and the heavier the broadcast message traffic, the lower the overhead per broadcast message becomes. Under abnormal operating conditions, a decentralized termination protocol (also presented) is invoked. A performance analysis of this protocol is presented, showing that this protocol commits with high probability under realistic operating conditions without invoking termination protocol if N is sufficiently large. The protocol retains its efficiency in wide-area networks where broadcast communication media are unavailable     

Estelle中的通道扩展及广播通道

广播通道（点到多点通道）是一种普遍适用于计算机通信网络的结构概念。而作为形式化描述技术（FDT）标准之一的Estelle,其本身并不支持广播通道的描述。对Estelle中的通道概念进行扩展,使其能够描述广播通道。通过分析Estelle通道的3种扩展方案,引入了虚拟转发接口模块（VFNM）的概念。在尽可能保持与原版本的兼容性和一致性的基础上,对新的基于VFNM的广播通道扩展模型的语法和语义进行修订说明,从而扩展了Estelle对广播通道的描述能力。     

Privacy-preserving identity-based broadcast encryption

Broadcast encryption enables a broadcaster to encrypt messages and transmit them to some subset S of authorized users. In identity-based broadcast encryption schemes, a broadcasting sender typically encrypts a message by combining public identities of receivers in S and system parameters. However, previous identity-based broadcast encryption schemes have not been concerned about preserving the privacy of receivers. Consequently, all of the identities of broadcast receivers in S are exposed to the public in the previous schemes, which may be subject to attacks on user privacy in lots of pragmatic applications. We propose a novel privacy-preserving identity-based broadcast encryption scheme against an active attacker. The proposed scheme protects the privacy of receivers of broadcasted messages by hiding the identities of receivers in S. Additionally, it achieves less storage and computation costs required to encrypt and decrypt the broadcast message, compared to the previous identity-based broadcast encryption schemes that do not provide user privacy.     

Centralized asynchronous broadcast in radio networks

We study asynchronous broadcasting in packet radio networks. A radio network is represented by a directed graph, in which one distinguished source node stores a message that needs to be disseminated among all the remaining nodes. An asynchronous execution of a protocol is a sequence of events, each consisting of simultaneous deliveries of messages. The correctness of protocols is considered for specific adversarial models defined by restrictions on events the adversary may schedule. A protocol specifies how many times the source message is to be retransmitted by each node. The total number of transmissions over all the nodes is called the work of the broadcast protocol; it is used as complexity measure. We study computational problems, to be solved by deterministic centralized algorithms, either to find a broadcast protocol or to verify the correctness of a protocol, for a given network. The amount of work necessary to make a protocol correct may have to be exponential in the size of network. There is a polynomial-time algorithm to find a broadcast protocol for a given network. We show that certain problems about broadcasting protocols for given networks are complete in NP and co-NP complexity classes.     

Effective protocols for kNN search on broadcast multi-dimensional index trees

In a wireless mobile environment, data broadcasting provides an efficient way to disseminate data. Via data broadcasting, a server can provide location-based services to a large client population in a wireless environment. Among different location-based services, the k nearest neighbors (kNN) search is important and is used to find the k closest objects to a given point. However, the kNN search in a broadcast environment is particularly challenging due to the sequential access to the data on a broadcast channel. We propose efficient protocols for the kNN search on a broadcast R-tree, which is a popular multi-dimensional index tree, in a wireless broadcast environment in terms of latency and tuning time as well as memory usage. We investigate how a server schedules the broadcast and provide the corresponding kNN search algorithms at the mobile clients. One of our kNN search protocols further allows a kNN search to start at an arbitrary time instance and it can skip the waiting time for the beginning of a broadcast cycle, thereby reducing the latency. The experimental results validate that our mechanisms achieve the objectives.     

A distributed spatial index for error-prone wireless data broadcast

Information is valuable to users when it is available not only at the right time but also at the right place. To support efficient location-based data access in wireless data broadcast systems, a distributed spatial index (called DSI) is presented in this paper. DSI is highly efficient because it has a linear yet fully distributed structure that naturally shares links in different search paths. DSI is very resilient to the error-prone wireless communication environment because interrupted search operations based on DSI can be resumed easily. It supports search algorithms for classical location-based queries such as window queries and kNN queries in both of the snapshot and continuous query modes. In-depth analysis and simulation-based evaluation have been conducted. The results show that DSI significantly out-performs a variant of R-trees tailored for wireless data broadcast environments.     

Mobile broadcast services with MIMO antennae in 4G wireless networks

The deployment of wireless data broadcast to empower mobile information services as a resource-conserving means offers significant benefits due to the scalability feature offered by the technology. In this paper, we present a novel and holistic data broadcast management approach in 4 G wireless networks with multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) antennae. The proposed scheme consists of three elements, namely: (i) broadcast ordering; (ii) Global indexing; and (iii) merging data structure. With the integration of these elements, we expect to obtain substantial efficiency for mobile computing clients when retrieving data on-air. We have experimentally evaluated the performance of the proposed model including comparison with the relevant schemes. The results from the experiments affirm the effectiveness of our proposed approach in respect to minimizing query access time and conserving energy utilization of the clients.     

A system for semantic segmentation of TV news broadcast videos

TV news channels present rich and complete experience of various events through audio-visual content. This makes television news an influential medium to affect masses and thus persuaded various social scientists and regulators to monitor and analyze the content of broadcast videos. An organized archive of newscast is a prerequisite for any such analysis. Creating such archive requires segmentation of continuous news videos into suitable logical units. Based on the application, these logical units may be one of channel content obtained after advertisement removal, different shows, news stories or video shots. In this work, we propose an end to end system with software architecture for segmenting the TV broadcast videos at all these four granularities. The videos are segmented into shots. Video shots are used as basic unit for all further processing. Video shots are first subjected to advertisement detection and removal to obtain the non-commercial channel content. This channel content is further processed to identify various program boundaries. We propose to identify three types of shows based on the presentation format viz. news bulletins, interviews and debates. News bulletins so obtained are processed further to obtain news stories. We propose a modular and scalable framework and software architecture for the broadcast segmentation system for deployment on a computation cluster. This involves scheduler based recording module and broadcast segmentation module. We have presented the detailed software architecture for individual modules, automation of entire processing pipeline along with resource and database management systems. We have implemented and verified the software architecture by deploying the proposed system on a cluster of nine desktops and one workstation. The deployed system was used for round the clock processing of three Indian English news channels.