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Articles 211 - 240 of 733

Full-Text Articles in Computer Engineering

Flexible Service Provisioning For Heterogeneous Sensor Networks, Chien-Liang Fok, Gruia-Catalin Roman, Chenyang Lu Jan 2008

Flexible Service Provisioning For Heterogeneous Sensor Networks, Chien-Liang Fok, Gruia-Catalin Roman, Chenyang Lu

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This paper presents Servilla, a highly flexible service provisioning framework for heterogeneous wireless sensor networks. Its service-oriented programming model and middleware enable developers to construct platform-independent applications over a dynamic set of devices with diverse computational resources and sensors. A salient feature of Servilla is its support for dynamic discovery and binding to local and remote services, which enables flexible and energy-efficient in-network collaboration among heterogeneous devices. Furthermore, Servilla provides a modular middleware architecture that can be easily tailored for devices with a wide range of resources, allowing even resource-limited devices to provide services and leverage resource-rich devices for in-network …


Scheduling Design And Verification For Open Soft Real-Time Systems, Robert Glaubius, Terry Tidwell, William D. Smart, Christopher Gill Jan 2008

Scheduling Design And Verification For Open Soft Real-Time Systems, Robert Glaubius, Terry Tidwell, William D. Smart, Christopher Gill

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Open soft real-time systems, such as mobile robots, experience unpredictable interactions with their environments and yet must respond both adaptively and with reasonable temporal predictability. New scheduling approaches are needed to address the demands of such systems, in which many of the assumptions made by traditional real-time scheduling theory do not hold. In previous work we established foundations for a scheduling policy design and verification approach for open soft real-time systems, that can use different decision models, e.g., a Markov Decision Process (MDP), to capture the nuances of their scheduling semantics. However, several important refinements to the preliminary techniques developed …


Faster Optimal State-Space Search With Graph Decomposition And Reduced Expansion, Yixin Chen Jan 2008

Faster Optimal State-Space Search With Graph Decomposition And Reduced Expansion, Yixin Chen

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Traditional AI search methods, such as BFS, DFS, and A*, look for a path from a starting state to the goal in a state space most typically modelled as a directed graph. Prohibitively large sizes of the state space graphs make optimal search difficult. A key observation, as manifested by the SAS+ formalism for planning, is that most commonly a state-space graph is well structured as the Cartesian product of several small subgraphs. This paper proposes novel search algorithms that exploit such structure. The results reveal that standard search algorithms may explore many redundant paths. Our algorithms provide an automatic …


Exploration Of Dynamic Memory, Delvin Curvin Defoe Aug 2007

Exploration Of Dynamic Memory, Delvin Curvin Defoe

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Since the advent of the Java programming language and the development of real-time garbage collection, Java has become an option for implementing real-time applications. The memory management choices provided by real-time garbage collection allow for real-time eJava developers to spend more of their time implementing real-time solutions. Unfortunately, the real-time community is not convinced that real-time garbage collection works in managing memory for Java applications deployed in a real-time context. Consequently, the Real-Time for Java Expert Group formulated the Real-Time Specification for Java (RTSJ) standards to make Java a real-time programming language. In lieu of garbage collection, the RTSJ proposed …


Comparing Features Of Three-Dimensional Object Models Using Registration Based On Surface Curvature Signatures, Timothy David Gatzke, Cindy M. Grimm May 2007

Comparing Features Of Three-Dimensional Object Models Using Registration Based On Surface Curvature Signatures, Timothy David Gatzke, Cindy M. Grimm

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This dissertation presents a technique for comparing local shape properties for similar three-dimensional objects represented by meshes. Our novel shape representation, the curvature map, describes shape as a function of surface curvature in the region around a point. A multi-pass approach is applied to the curvature map to detect features at different scales. The feature detection step does not require user input or parameter tuning. We use features ordered by strength, the similarity of pairs of features, and pruning based on geometric consistency to efficiently determine key corresponding locations on the objects. For genus zero objects, the corresponding locations are …


Unwoven Aspect Analysis, Morgan G. Deters May 2007

Unwoven Aspect Analysis, Morgan G. Deters

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Various languages and tools supporting advanced separation of concerns (such as aspect-oriented programming) provide a software developer with the ability to separate functional and non-functional programmatic intentions. Once these separate pieces of the software have been specified, the tools automatically handle interaction points between separate modules, relieving the developer of this chore and permitting more understandable, maintainable code. Many approaches have left traditional compiler analysis and optimization until after the composition has been performed; unfortunately, analyses performed after composition cannot make use of the logical separation present in the original program. Further, for modular systems that can be configured with …


Performance Evaluation For Hybrid Architectures, Praveen Krishnamurthy Feb 2007

Performance Evaluation For Hybrid Architectures, Praveen Krishnamurthy

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In this dissertation we discuss methologies for estimating the performance of applications on hybrid architectures, systems that include various types of computing resources (e.g. traditional general-purpose processors, chip multiprocessors, reconfigurable hardware). A common use of hybrid architectures will be to deploy coarse pipeline stages of application on "suitable" compute units with communication path for transferring data. The first problem we focus on relates to the sizing the data queues between the different processing elements of an hybrid system. Much of the discussion centers on our analytical models that can be used to derive performance metrics of interest such as, throughput …


Mercury Blast Dictionaries: Analysis And Performance Measurement, Jeremy Buhler Jan 2007

Mercury Blast Dictionaries: Analysis And Performance Measurement, Jeremy Buhler

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This report describes a hashing scheme for a dictionary of short bit strings. The scheme, which we call near-perfect hashing, was designed as part of the construction of Mercury BLAST, an FPGA-based accelerator for the BLAST family of biosequence comparison algorithms. Near-perfect hashing is a heuristic variant of the well-known displacement hashing approach to building perfect hash functions. It uses a family of hash functions composed from linear transformations on bit vectors and lookups in small precomputed tables, both of which are especially appropriate for implementation in ardware logic. We show empirically that for inputs derived from genomic DNA sequences, …


Network Access In A Diversified Internet, M. Wilson, F. Kuhns, J. Turner Jan 2007

Network Access In A Diversified Internet, M. Wilson, F. Kuhns, J. Turner

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There is a growing interest in virtualized network infrastructures as a means to enable experimental evaluation of new network architectures on a realistic scale. The National Science Foundation's GENI initiative seeks to develop a national experimental facility that would include virtualized network platforms that can support many concurrent experimental networks. Some researchers seek to make virtualization a central architectural component of a future Internet, so that new network architectures can be introduced at any time, without the barriers to entry that currently make this difficult. This paper focuses on how to extend the concept of virtualized networking through LAN-based access …


Extending Bpel For Interoperable Pervasive Computing, Gregory Hackmann, Christopher Gill, Christopher Gill, Gruia-Catalin Roman Jan 2007

Extending Bpel For Interoperable Pervasive Computing, Gregory Hackmann, Christopher Gill, Christopher Gill, Gruia-Catalin Roman

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The widespread deployment of mobile devices like PDAs and mobile phones has created a vast computation and communication platform for pervasive computing applications. However, these devices feature an array of incompatible hardware and software architectures, discouraging ad-hoc interactions among devices. The Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) allows users in wired computing settings to model applications of significant complexity, leveraging Web standards to guarantee interoperability. However, BPEL's inflexible communication model effectively prohibits its deployment on the kinds of dynamic wireless networks used by most pervasive computing devices. This paper presents extensions to BPEL that address these restrictions, transforming BPEL into a …


Optimal Discrete Rate Adaptation For Distributed Real-Time Systems With End-To-End Tasks, Yingming Chen, Chenyang Lu, Xenofon Koutsoukos Jan 2007

Optimal Discrete Rate Adaptation For Distributed Real-Time Systems With End-To-End Tasks, Yingming Chen, Chenyang Lu, Xenofon Koutsoukos

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Many distributed real-time systems face the challenge of dynamically maximizing system utility in response to fluctuations in system workload. We present the MultiParametric Rate Adaptation (MPRA) algorithm for discrete rate adaptation in distributed real-time systems with end-to-end tasks. The key novelty and advantage of MPRA is that it can efficiently produce optimal solutions in response to workload changes such as dynamic task arrivals. Through oline preprocessing MPRA transforms a NP-hard utility optimization problem to a set of simple linear functions in different regions expressed in term of CPU utilization changes caused by workload variations. At run time MPRA produces optimal …


Configurable Component Middleware For Distributed Real-Time Systems With Aperiodic And Periodic Tasks, Yuanfang Zhang, Christopher Gill, Chenyang Lu Jan 2007

Configurable Component Middleware For Distributed Real-Time Systems With Aperiodic And Periodic Tasks, Yuanfang Zhang, Christopher Gill, Chenyang Lu

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Many distributed real-time applications must handle mixed periodic and aperiodic tasks with diverse requirements. However, existing middleware lacks flexible configuration mechanisms needed to manage end-to-end timing easily for a wide range of different applications with both periodic and aperiodic tasks. The primary contribution of this work is the design, implementation and performance evaluation of the first configurable component middleware services for admission control and load balancing of aperiodic and periodic tasks in distributed real-time systems. Empirical results demonstrate the need for and effectiveness of our configurable component middleware approach in supporting different applications with periodic and aperiodic tasks.


Fair Efficiency, Or Low Average Delay Without Starvation, Christoph Jechlitschek, Sergey Gorinsky Jan 2007

Fair Efficiency, Or Low Average Delay Without Starvation, Christoph Jechlitschek, Sergey Gorinsky

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Elastic applications are primarily interested in minimal delay achievable for their messages under current network load. In this paper, we investigate how to transmit such messages over a bottleneck link efficiently and fairly. While SRPT (Shortest Remaining Processing Time) is an optimally efficient algorithm that minimizes average delay of messages, large messages might starve under SRPT in heavy load conditions. PS (Processor Sharing) and ViFi (Virtual Finish Time First) are fair but yield higher average delays than under SRPT. We explore the class of fair algorithms further and prove that no online algorithm in this class is optimally efficient. Then, …


Scheduling Induced Bounds And The Verification Of Preemptive Real-Time Systems, Terry Tidwell, Christopher Gill, Venkita Subramonian Jan 2007

Scheduling Induced Bounds And The Verification Of Preemptive Real-Time Systems, Terry Tidwell, Christopher Gill, Venkita Subramonian

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Distributed real-time and embedded (DRE) systems have stringent constraints on timeliness and other properties whose assurance is crucial to correct system behavior. Our previous research has shown that detailed models of essential middleware mechanisms can be developed, composed, and for constrained examples verified tractably, using state of the art timed automata model checkers. However, to apply model checking to a wider range of real-time systems, particularly those involving more general forms of preemptive concurrency, new techniques are needed to address decidability and tractability concerns. This paper makes three contributions to research on formal verification and validation of DRE systems. First, …


Emergent Task Allocation For Mobile Robots Through Intentions And Directives, Nuzhet Atay, Burchan Bayazit Jan 2007

Emergent Task Allocation For Mobile Robots Through Intentions And Directives, Nuzhet Atay, Burchan Bayazit

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Multi-robot systems require efficient and accurate planning in order to perform mission-critical tasks. However, algorithms that find the optimal solution are usually computationally expensive and may require a large number of messages between the robots as the robots need to be aware of the global spatiotemporal information. In this paper, we introduce an emergent task allocation approach for mobile robots. Each robot uses only the information obtained from its immediate neighbors in its decision. Our technique is general enough to be applicable to any task allocation scheme as long as a utilization criteria is given. We demonstrate that our approach …


Perpetual: Byzantine Fault Tolerance For Federated Distributed Applications, Sajeeva L. Pallemulle, Haraldur D. Thorvaldsson, Kenneth J. Goldman Jan 2007

Perpetual: Byzantine Fault Tolerance For Federated Distributed Applications, Sajeeva L. Pallemulle, Haraldur D. Thorvaldsson, Kenneth J. Goldman

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Modern distributed applications rely upon the functionality of services from multiple providers. Mission-critical services, possibly shared by multiple applications, must be replicated to guarantee correct execution and availability in spite of arbitrary (Byzantine) faults. Furthermore, shared services must enforce strict fault isolation policies to prevent cascading failures across organizational and application boundaries. Most existing protocols for Byzantine fault-tolerant execution do not support interoperability between replicated services while others provide poor fault isolation. Moreover, existing protocols place impractical limitations on application development by disallowing long-running threads of computation, asynchronous operation invocation, and asynchronous request processing. We present Perpetual, a protocol that …


Expression Profiling Of Human Donor Lungs To Understand Primary Graft Dysfunction After Lung Transplantation, Monika Ray, Sekhar Dharmarajan, Johannes Freudenberg, Weixiong Zhang, Alexander G. Patterson Jan 2007

Expression Profiling Of Human Donor Lungs To Understand Primary Graft Dysfunction After Lung Transplantation, Monika Ray, Sekhar Dharmarajan, Johannes Freudenberg, Weixiong Zhang, Alexander G. Patterson

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Lung transplantation is the treatment of choice for end-stage pulmonary diseases. A limited donor supply has resulted in 4000 patients on the waiting list. Currently, 10-20% of donor organs offered for transplantation are deemed suitable under the selection criteria, of which 15-25% fails due to primary graft dysfunction (PGD). This has resulted in increased efforts to search for alternative donor lungs selection criteria. In this study, we attempt to further our understanding of PGD by observing the changes in gene expression across donor lungs that developed PGD versus those that did not. Our second goal is to use a machine …


Improving Individual Flow Performance With Multiple Queue Fair Queuing, Manfred Georg, Christopher Jechlitschek, Sergey Gorinsky Jan 2007

Improving Individual Flow Performance With Multiple Queue Fair Queuing, Manfred Georg, Christopher Jechlitschek, Sergey Gorinsky

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Fair Queuing (FQ) algorithms provide isolation between packet flows, allowing max-min fair sharing of a link even when flows misbehave. However, fairness comes at the expense of per-flow state. To keep the memory requirement independent of the flow count, the router can isolate aggregates of flows, rather than individual flows. We investigate the feasibility of protecting individual flows under such aggregate isolation in the context of Multiple Queue Fair Queuing (MQFQ), where the router maintains a fixed number of queues and associates multiple queues with each flow. MQFQ places packets in the shortest queue associated with their flow. The redundancy …


Splice: A Standardized Peripheral Logic And Interface Creation Engine, Justin Thiel Jan 2007

Splice: A Standardized Peripheral Logic And Interface Creation Engine, Justin Thiel

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Recent advancements in FPGA technology have allowed manufacturers to place general-purpose processors alongside user-configurable logic gates on a single chip. At first glance, these integrated devices would seem to be the ideal deployment platform for hardware-software co-designed systems, but some issues, such as incompatibility across vendors and confusion over which bus interfaces to support, have impeded adoption of these platforms. This thesis describes the design and operation of Splice, a software-based code generation tool intended to address these types of issues by providing a bus-independent structure that allows end-users to easily integrate their customized peripheral logic into embedded systems. To …


Byzantine Fault-Tolerant Web Services For N-Tier And Service Oriented Architectures, Sajeeva L. Pallemulle, Kenneth J. Goldman Jan 2007

Byzantine Fault-Tolerant Web Services For N-Tier And Service Oriented Architectures, Sajeeva L. Pallemulle, Kenneth J. Goldman

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Web Services that provide mission-critical functionality must be replicated to guarantee correct execution and high availability in spite of arbitrary (Byzantine) faults. Existing approaches for Byzantine fault-tolerant execution of Web Services are inadequate to guarantee correct execution due to several major limitations. Some approaches do not support interoperability between replicated Web Services. Other approaches do not provide fault isolation guarantees that are strong enough to prevent cascading failures across organizational and application boundaries. Moreover, existing approaches place impractical limitations on application development by not supporting long-running active threads of computation, fully asynchronous communication, and access to host specific information. We …


Efficient Fair Algorithms For Message Communication, Sergey Gorinsky, Eric J. Friedman, Shane Henderson, Christoph Jechlitschek Jan 2007

Efficient Fair Algorithms For Message Communication, Sergey Gorinsky, Eric J. Friedman, Shane Henderson, Christoph Jechlitschek

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A computer network serves distributed applications by communicating messages between their remote ends. Many such applications desire minimal delay for their messages. Beside this efficiency objective, allocation of the network capacity is also subject to the fairness constraint of not shutting off communication for any individual message. Processor Sharing (PS) is a de facto standard of fairness but provides significantly higher average delay than Shortest Remaining Processing Time (SRPT), which is an optimally efficient but unfair algorithm. In this paper, we explore efficient fair algorithms for message communication where fairness means that no message is delivered later than under PS. …


Strong Performance Guarantees For Asynchronous Buffered Crossbar Schedulers, Jonathon Turner Jan 2007

Strong Performance Guarantees For Asynchronous Buffered Crossbar Schedulers, Jonathon Turner

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Crossbar-based switches are commonly used to implement routers with throughputs up to about 1 Tb/s. The advent of crossbar scheduling algorithms that provide strong performance guarantees now makes it possible to engineer systems that perform well, even under extreme traffic conditions. Until recently, such performance guarantees have only been developed for crossbars that switch cells rather than variable length packets. Cell-based crossbars incur a worst-case bandwidth penalty of up to a factor of two, since they must fragment variable length packets into fixed length cells. In addition, schedulers for cell-based crossbars may fail to deliver the expected performance guarantees when …


Lower Bounds On Queuing And Loss At Highly Multiplexed Links, Maxim Podlesny, Sergey Gorinsky Jan 2007

Lower Bounds On Queuing And Loss At Highly Multiplexed Links, Maxim Podlesny, Sergey Gorinsky

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Explicit and delay-driven congestion control protocols strive to preclude overflow of link buffers by reducing transmission upon incipient congestion. In this paper, we explore fundamental limitations of any congestion control with respect to minimum queuing and loss achievable at highly multiplexed links. We present and evaluate an idealized protocol where all flows always transmit at equal rates. The ideally smooth congestion control causes link queuing only due to asynchrony of flow arrivals, which is intrinsic to computer networks. With overprovisioned buffers, our analysis and simulations for different smooth distributions of flow interarrival times agree that minimum queuing at a fully …


A Fingerspelling Sign Language Visualization , Carol S. Brickman Jan 2007

A Fingerspelling Sign Language Visualization , Carol S. Brickman

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The goal of the Fingerspell Visualization Project is to research methods to improve learning of reading skills through sign language. The techniques are centered on Fingerspelling as the method to bridge stages of skill development. Visualization of a string of text in images of a hand performing the letters of the alphabet in standardized fingerspell sign language positions provide Full Motion Learning as opposed to learning from single pictures.


Determining Alpha-Helix Correspondence For Protein Structure Prediction From Cryo-Em Density Maps, Master's Thesis, May 2007, Sasakthi S. Abeysinghe Jan 2007

Determining Alpha-Helix Correspondence For Protein Structure Prediction From Cryo-Em Density Maps, Master's Thesis, May 2007, Sasakthi S. Abeysinghe

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Determining protein structure is an important problem for structural biologists, which has received a significant amount of attention in the recent years. In this thesis, we describe a novel, shape-modeling approach as an intermediate step towards recovering 3D protein structures from volumetric images. The input to our method is a sequence of alpha-helices that make up a protein, and a low-resolution volumetric image of the protein where possible locations of alpha-helices have been detected. Our task is to identify the correspondence between the two sets of helices, which will shed light on how the protein folds in space. The central …


Dna Repair In Incipient Alzheimer's Disease, Monika Ray, Weixiong Zhang Jan 2007

Dna Repair In Incipient Alzheimer's Disease, Monika Ray, Weixiong Zhang

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Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is a progressive neurodegenerative disorder currently with no cure. Understanding the pathogenesis in the early stages of late-onset AD can help gain important mechanistic insights into this disease as well as aid in effective drug development. The analysis of incipient AD is steeped in difficulties due to its slight pathological and genetic differences from normal ageing. The difficulty also lies in the choice of analysis techniques as statistical power to analyse incipient AD with a small sample size, as is common in pilot studies, can be low if the proper analytical tool is not employed. In this …


Mlds: A Flexible Location Directory Service For Tiered Sensor Networks, Sangeeta Bhattacharya, Chien-Liang Fok, Chenyang Lu, Gruia-Catalin Roman Jan 2007

Mlds: A Flexible Location Directory Service For Tiered Sensor Networks, Sangeeta Bhattacharya, Chien-Liang Fok, Chenyang Lu, Gruia-Catalin Roman

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Many emergent distributed sensing applications need to keep track of mobile entities across multiple sensor networks connected via an IP network. To simplify the realization of such applications, we present MLDS, a Multi-resolution Location Directory Service for tiered sensor networks. MLDS provides a rich set of spatial query services ranging from simple queries about entity location, to complex nearest neighbor queries. Furthermore, MLDS supports multiple query granularities which allow an application to achieve the desired tradeoff between query accuracy and communication cost. We implemented MLDS on Agimone, a unified middleware for sensor and IP networks. We then deployed and evaluated …


Real-Time Query Scheduling For Wireless Sensor Networks, Octav Chipara, Chenyang Lu, Gruia-Catalin Roman Jan 2007

Real-Time Query Scheduling For Wireless Sensor Networks, Octav Chipara, Chenyang Lu, Gruia-Catalin Roman

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Recent years have seen the emergence of wireless sensor network (WSN) systems that require high data rate real-time communication. This paper proposes Real-Time Query Scheduling (RTQS), a novel approach to conflict-free transmission scheduling for real-time queries in WSNs. We show that there is an inherent trade-off between prioritization and throughput in conflict-free query scheduling. RTQS provides three new real-time scheduling algorithms. The non-preemptive query scheduling algorithm achieves high throughput while introducing priority inversions. The preemptive query scheduling algorithm eliminates priority inversion at the cost of reduced throughput. The slack stealing query scheduling algorithm combines the benefits of preemptive and non-preemptive …


A Duality Theory With Zero Duality Gap For Nonlinear Programming, Yixin Chen Jan 2007

A Duality Theory With Zero Duality Gap For Nonlinear Programming, Yixin Chen

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Duality is an important notion for constrained optimization which provides a theoretical foundation for a number of constraint decomposition schemes such as separable programming and for deriving lower bounds in space decomposition algorithms such as branch and bound. However, the conventional duality theory has the fundamental limit that it leads to duality gaps for nonconvex optimization problems, especially discrete and mixed-integer problems where the feasible sets are nonconvex. In this paper, we propose a novel extended duality theory for nonlinear optimization that overcomes some limitations of previous dual methods. Based on a new dual function, the extended duality theory leads …


Hexa: Compact Data Structures For Faster Packet Processing, Sailesh Kumar, Jonathan Turner, Patrick Crowley, Michael Mitzenmacher Jan 2007

Hexa: Compact Data Structures For Faster Packet Processing, Sailesh Kumar, Jonathan Turner, Patrick Crowley, Michael Mitzenmacher

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Directed graphs with edge labels are used in packet processing algorithms for a variety of network applications. In this paper we present a novel representation for such graph that significantly reduces the memory required for such graphs. This approach called History-based Encoding, eXecution and Addressing (HEXA) challenges the conventional assumption that graph data structures must store pointers of log2n bits to identify successor nodes. HEXA takes advantage of implict information to reduce the information that must be stored explicitly. We demonstrate that the binary tries used for IP route lookup can be implemented using just two bytes per stored prefix …