An ant algorithm for balanced job scheduling in grids

Grid computing utilizes the distributed heterogeneous resources in order to support complicated computing problems. Grid can be classified into two types: computing grid and data grid. Job scheduling in computing grid is a very important problem. To utilize grids efficiently, we need a good job scheduling algorithm to assign jobs to resources in grids.In the natural environment, the ants have a tremendous ability to team up to find an optimal path to food resources. An ant algorithm simulates the behavior of ants. In this paper, we propose a Balanced Ant Colony Optimization (BACO) algorithm for job scheduling in the Grid environment. The main contributions of our work are to balance the entire system load while trying to minimize the makespan of a given set of jobs. Compared with the other job scheduling algorithms, BACO can outperform them according to the experimental results.     

A multiple parallel download scheme with server throughput and client bandwidth considerations for data grids

Though computer technology advances quickly, the computing speed and storage capacity of a single computer still cannot satisfy the requirements of many applications. As a result, grids have emerged to utilize the collective power of many computers. One of them, the data grid, provides a mechanism for handling a large amount of data. One of the characteristics of a data grid is to replicate files to many different computers such that a popular file would be more available. If a grid site does not have a file, it will have to download it from other grid sites. Thus, the parallel download method, which allows a user to download different parts of a file from various computers simultaneously, is used to decrease download time.However, multiple parallel downloads will affect one another. Thus if all jobs in the grid system use parallel download, the problem of resource competition and conflict will happen. In this paper, we propose a parallel download scheme considering the server output throughput limits and client input bandwidth constraints. Experimental results show that the proposed download scheme outperforms static and dynamic parallel download schemes.     

A cross-layer congestion and contention window control scheme for TCP performance improvement in wireless LANs

Neither the current TCP protocol nor the standard backoff algorithm of IEEE 802.11 protocol is able to distinguish corruption loss from congestion or collision loss. Hence, high transmission errors and a varying latency inherent in wireless channel would have a seriously adverse effect on the performance of TCP. In this paper, we propose a novel and pragmatic cross-layer approach with joint congestion and contention window control scheme to improve the performance of TCP in IEEE 802.11 wireless environments. In addition to theoretical analysis, simulations are conducted to evaluate the proposed scheme. As it turns out, our design indeed provides a more efficient solution for frequent transmission loss and enables TCP to distinguish between congestion loses and transmission errors, thus to take proper remedial actions.     

A distributed link scheduling algorithm for CDMA packet radio networks

A distributed algorithm for the conflict-free channel allocation in CDMA (code division multiple access) networks is presented. Dynamic adjustment to topological changes is also considered. Though the schedules produced by our algorithm are not optimal with respect to link schedule length, the algorithm is simple and practical. The link schedule length minimization problem is NP-complete. Here the length of a link schedule is the number of time slots it uses. The algorithm guarantees a bound 2 — 1 time slots on the TDMA cycle length, where is the maximum degree of a station (i.e., maximum number of stations that a station can reach by radio links) in the network. The message complexity of a station isO().     

Improved WWW multimedia transmission performance in HTTP/TCP overATM networks

Transmission control protocol/Internet protocol (TCP/IP) is the de facto standard of the networking world. It dynamically adjusts routing of packets to accommodate failures in channels and allows construction of very large networks with little central management. But IP packets are based on the datagram model and are not really suited to real-time traffic. In order to overcome the drawbacks, a new network technology, ATM, is proposed. ATM provides quality of service (QOS) guarantees for various classes of applications and in-order delivery of packets via connection oriented virtual circuits. Unfortunately, when ATM is to be internetworked with the existing network infrastructure, some special signaling, addressing and routing protocols are needed. IP over ATM is one of the methods proposed by IETF. It allows existing TCP/IP applications to run on ATM end-stations and ATM networks to interconnect with legacy LAN/WAN technologies. But the performance of TCP/IP over ATM leaves something to be desired. Partial packet discard (PPD) and early packet discard (EPD) are two schemes to improve its performance. This paper proposes a “selective packet retransmission” scheme for improving HTTP/TCP performance when transmitting through ATM networks. In selective packet retransmission, we take advantage of the property of humans' perception tolerance for errors to determine whether to retransmit a corrupted TCP segment or not. For lossable data, such as images, when an error occurs because of cell losses, it will not be retransmitted. The simulations show that, for the same buffer size and traffic load, selective packet retransmission performs better than PPD, EPD, and plain TCP over ATM     

A nonpreemptive priority-based access control scheme for broadbandad hoc wireless ATM local area networks

The DQRUMA (distributed-queueing request update multiple access) protocol has been considered as an access protocol for the BAHAMA (broadband ad hoc wireless ATM local area network). However, it cannot support the service discipline of integrated multimedia traffic since it does not include any priority and access control policy. In this paper, we propose a nonpreemptive priority-based access control scheme for the DQRUMA protocol. Under such a scheme, modifying the CSMA/CA protocol in the contention period supports many levels of priorities such that user mobility (handoff) can be supported in BAHAMA. Besides, the proposed transmit-permission policy and adaptive bandwidth allocation scheme provide various QoS (quality-of-service) guarantees while maintaining high bandwidth utilization. Simulations show that it provides a good performance in ad hoc wireless ATM LAN environments     

SNMP through WWW

In this article we propose a bilingual agent to accept either SNMP or HTTP commands and design several HTML pages to facilitate the task of network management. For network elements that support only SNMP, the bilingual agent can act as a proxy, so that the traditional SNMP agent can also be queried through the Web browser. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Constructing dual-CISTs of pancake graphs and performance assessment of protection routings on some Cayley networks

The Journal of Supercomputing - For a connected graph $$G=(V,E)$$ , two spanning trees $$T_1$$ and $$T_2$$ of G are said to be a pair of completely independent spanning trees (or a dual-CIST for...