Distributed sorting algorithms for multi-channel broadcast networks

A multi-channel broadcast network is a distributed computation model in which p independent processors communicate over a set of p shared broadcast channels. Computation proceeds in synchronous cycles, during each of which the processors first write and read the channels, then perform local computations. Performance is measured in terms of the number of cycles used in the computation, where each bit to be transmitted is assumed to require a separate cycle. In this paper we investigate the problem of sorting p bit strings of uniform length m, each string initially located at a different processor in the broadcast network. We develop an efficient sorting method that first reduces the length of the strings without affecting their relative order, then proceeds using only the shorter strings. A sequence of three successively improved algorithms based on this approach is presented, the best of which runs in O(m + p log p) cycles. By showing a lower bound of Ω(m) cycles, we prove that the algorithm is optimal for sufficiently large m. Our results improve by a factor of log p the solution of the multiple identification problem presented by Landau, Yung and Galil (1985).     

Realizing and benchmarking broadcast algorithms in wireless mesh networks

Broadcasting by flooding causes the broadcast storm problem in multi-hop wireless networks. This problem becomes more likely in a wireless mesh network (WMN) because WMNs can bridge wired LANs, increasing broadcast traffic and collision probability. Since the network control, routing, and topology maintenance of a WMN highly rely on layer-2 broadcasting, unreliable broadcast algorithms directly destabilize a WMN. Researchers have developed many algorithms for efficient and reliable broadcast in multi-hop wireless networks. However, real-world systems rarely verify or compare these approaches, especially in a WMN. This paper examines six representative broadcast algorithms: simple flooding, dynamic probabilistic, efficient counter-based broadcast, scalable broadcast, domain pruning, and connected-dominating-set based algorithms. This study addresses both common and algorithm-specific implementation in a real-world IEEE 802.11s WMN testbed. Experiments under various topologies and packet lengths reveal the reliability, forwarding ratio, and efficiency of these six algorithms. Quantitative survey results indicate that the scalable broadcast algorithm possesses the best reliability due to its lower collision probability. The domain-pruning algorithm is the most efficient algorithm when considering both reliability and the forwarding ratio.     

Design and analysis of dynamic leader election protocols in broadcast networks

Summary.  The well-known problem of leader election in distributed systems is considered in a dynamic context where processes may participate and crash spontaneously. Processes communicate by means of buffered broadcasting as opposed to usual point-to-point communication. In this paper we design a leader election protocol in such a dynamic context. As the problem at hand is considerably complex we develop the protocol in three steps. In the initial design processes are considered to be perfect and a leader is assumed to be present initially. In the second protocol, the assumption of an initial leader is dropped. This leads to a symmetric protocol which uses an (abstract) timeout mechanism to detect the absence of a leader. Finally, in the last step of the design processes may crash without giving any notification of other processes. The worst case message complexity of all protocols is addressed. A formal approach to the specification and verification of the leader election protocols is adopted. The requirements are specified in a property-oriented way and the protocols are denoted by means of extended finite state machines. It is proven using linear-time temporal logic that the fault-tolerant protocol satisfies its requirements. Received: September 1993 / Revised: September 1995     

Distributed election in complete networks

An improved version of Afek and Gafni's synchronous algorithm for distributed election in complete networks is given and anO(n) expected message complexity is shown. M.Y. Chan received her Ph.D. in 1988 from the University of Hong Kong, and her M.S. and B.A. degrees in computer science from the University of California, San Diego in 1980 and 1981, respectively. She is currently an Assistant Professor at the University of Texas at Dallas. Francis Y.L. Chin (S71-M76-SM85) received the B.Sc. degree in engineering science from the University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada, in 1972, and the M.S., M.A., and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering and computer science from Princeton University, New Jersey, in 1974, 1975, and 1976, respectively. Since 1975, he has taught at the University of Maryland, Baltimore Country, University of California, San Diego, University of Alberta, and Chinese University of Hong Kong. He is currently Head of the Department of Computer Science, University of Hong Kong. He has served as a program co-chairman of the 1988 International Conference on Computer Processing of Chinese and Oriental Languages (Toronto) and the International Computer Science Conference '88 (Hong Kong). His current research interests include algorithm design and analysis, parallel and distributed computing.     

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.     

Energy efficient all-to-all broadcast in all-wireless networks

All-to-all broadcast is a communication pattern in which every node initiates a broadcast. In this paper, we investigate the problem of building a unique cast tree of minimum total energy, which we call Minimum Unique Cast (MUC) tree, to be used for all-to-all broadcast. The MUC tree is unoriented and unrooted. We study three known heuristics for the minimum-energy broadcast problem: the Broadcast Incremental Power (BIP) algorithm, the Wireless Multicast Advantage-conforming Minimum Spanning Tree (WMA-conforming MST) algorithm, and the Iterative Maximum-Branch Minimization (IMBM) algorithm. Experimental results conducted on various types of networks are reported. We show that neither of these methods is best overall for building all-to-all broadcast trees.     

Generalized Beimel-Chor schemes for broadcast encryption and interactive key distribution

In 1993, Beimel and Chor presented an unconditionally secure interactive protocol which allows a subset of users in a network to establish a common key. This scheme made use of a key predistribution scheme due to Blom. In this paper, we describe some variations and generalizations of the Beimel-Chor scheme, including broadcast encryption schemes as well as interactive key distribution schemes. Our constructions use the key predistribution scheme of Blundo et al., which is a generalization of the Blom scheme. We obtain families of schemes in which the amount of secret information held by the network users can be traded off against the amount of information that needs to be broadcast. We also consider lower bounds for protocols of these types, using the concept of entropy as our main tool. Some of our schemes are optimal (or close to optimal) with respect to the bounds we prove.     

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     

Reduction of the broadcast redundancy by location awareness in mobile ad hoc networks

In this paper, a reachability-guaranteed approach for reducing broadcast storms in MANET is proposed. The approach is based on location awareness of each node, which means each node in the network needs to equip the positioning device like GPS and exchanges location information in the HELLO message with its neighbors. Three mechanisms are included in the proposed approach: Relay Set (RS), Neighbor Coverage (NC), and Transmission Order (TO). RS is a sender-based mechanism in which the sending node of the broadcast message determines the relay set of its neighbors for rebroadcast according to the radio coverage of the neighbors. The idea of the received-based NC is: a node receiving a broadcast message does not have to rebroadcast the message if all its neighbors have received the same message. TO mechanism requires a farther neighbor node away from the sending node to rebroadcast the message earlier than closer nodes so that a closer node may have more chances to save the rebroadcast. Simulation results have shown that the proposed approach ‘RS+NC+TO’ has a better performance than existing solutions like threshold-based schemes and angle-based scheme in terms of 100% reachability, more saved rebroadcast, and shorter average latency.     

Kolmogorov complexity and combinatorial methods in communication complexity

We introduce a method based on Kolmogorov complexity to prove lower bounds on communication complexity. The intuition behind our technique is close to information theoretic methods.We use Kolmogorov complexity for three different things: first, to give a general lower bound in terms of Kolmogorov mutual information; second, to prove an alternative to Yao’s minmax principle based on Kolmogorov complexity; and finally, to identify hard inputs.We show that our method implies the rectangle and corruption bounds, known to be closely related to the subdistribution bound. We apply our method to the hidden matching problem, a relation introduced to prove an exponential gap between quantum and classical communication. We then show that our method generalizes the VC dimension and shatter coefficient lower bounds. Finally, we compare one-way communication and simultaneous communication in the case of distributional communication complexity and improve the previous known result.     

The communication complexity of the Hamming distance problem

We investigate the randomized and quantum communication complexity of the Hamming Distance problem, which is to determine if the Hamming distance between two n-bit strings is no less than a threshold d. We prove a quantum lower bound of Ω(d) qubits in the general interactive model with shared prior entanglement. We also construct a classical protocol of O(dlogd) bits in the restricted Simultaneous Message Passing model with public random coins, improving previous protocols of O(d²) bits [A.C.-C. Yao, On the power of quantum fingerprinting, in: Proceedings of the 35th Annual ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing, 2003, pp. 77-81], and O(dlogn) bits [D. Gavinsky, J. Kempe, R. de Wolf, Quantum communication cannot simulate a public coin, quant-ph/0411051, 2004].     

Information delivery through broadcasting in satellite communication networks

Satellite broadcast is an important candidate for large-scale multimedia information distribution due to the inherent wide-range multicasting capability of satellites and the asymmetry of satellite communications (high bandwidth downlink, limited bandwidth uplink) that matches nicely the information flow asymmetry in multimedia applications. We consider a data broadcasting model that is encountered in most asymmetric satellite communication environments. The problem of scheduling the data broadcast such that average response time experienced by the users is low is considered. In a push-based system, where the users cannot place requests directly to the server and the broadcast schedule should be determined based solely on the access probabilities, we formulate a deterministic dynamic optimization problem, the solution of which provides the optimal broadcast schedule. Properties of the optimal solution are obtained and then we propose a suboptimal dynamic policy which achieves average response time close to the lower bound. In a pull-based system where the users may place requests about information items directly to the server, the scheduling can be based on the number of pending requests for each item. Suboptimal policies with good performance are obtained in this case as well. If a user has local memory, it can alleviate its access latency by selectively prefetching the items from the broadcast and storing them in the memory. A good memory management strategy can substantially reduce the user's access latency. An optimal memory management policy is identified, that minimizes the expected aggregate latency. Memory update strategies with limited look-ahead are presented as implementable approximations of the optimal policy as well. We also consider the problem of joint broadcast scheduling and user's cache management and propos a joint optimization scheme which can achieve the performance up to 40% better than the existing non-joint approach.     

Techniques for pipelined broadcast on ethernet switched clusters

By splitting a large broadcast message into segments and broadcasting the segments in a pipelined fashion, pipelined broadcast can achieve high performance in many systems. In this paper, we investigate techniques for efficient pipelined broadcast on clusters connected by multiple Ethernet switches. Specifically, we develop algorithms for computing various contention-free broadcast trees that are suitable for pipelined broadcast on Ethernet switched clusters, extend the parametrized LogP model for predicting appropriate segment sizes for pipelined broadcast, show that the segment sizes computed based on the model yield high performance, and evaluate various pipelined broadcast schemes through experimentation on Ethernet switched clusters with various topologies. The results demonstrate that our techniques are practical and efficient for contemporary fast Ethernet and Giga-bit Ethernet clusters.     

Bounds on tradeoffs between randomness and communication complexity

The power of randomness in improving the efficiency (or even possibility) of computations has been demonstrated in numerous contexts. A fundamental question ishow much randomness is required for these improvements, or how does the improvement grow as a function of the amount of randomness allowed. This quantitative question, restricted to the context of communication complexity, is the focus of our paper.We prove general lower bounds on the amount of randomness used in randomized protocols for computing a functionf, the input of which is split between two parties. The bounds depend on the number of bits communicated and the deterministic communication complexity off. Four models for communication complexity are considered: the random input of the parties may be public or private, and the communication may be one-way or two-way. (Unbounded advantage is allowed.)The bounds are shown to be tight; i.e., we demonstrate functions and protocols for these functions which meet the above bounds up to a constant factor. We do this for all the models, for all values of the deterministic communication complexity, and for all possible quantities of bits communicated.     

The BNS-Chung criterion for multi-party communication complexity

The "Number on the Forehead" model of multi-party communication complexity was first suggested by Chandra, Furst and Lipton. The best known lower bound, for an explicit function (in this model), is a lower bound of , where n is the size of the input of each player, and k is the number of players (first proved by Babai, Nisan and Szegedy). This lower bound has many applications in complexity theory. Proving a better lower bound, for an explicit function, is a major open problem. Based on the result of BNS, Chung gave a sufficient criterion for a function to have large multi-party communication complexity (up to ). In this paper, we use some of the ideas of BNS and Chung, together with some new ideas, resulting in a new (easier and more modular) proof for the results of BNS and Chung. This gives a simpler way to prove lower bounds for the multi-party communication complexity of a function. Received: December 12, 1997.     

Performance comparison of routing algorithms in wormhole-switched networks

This paper presents, building on the analytical models developed in [A. Shahrabi, M. Ould-Khoua, L. Mackenzie, Performance modelling of broadcast communication in multicomputer networks, International Journal of Parallel, Emergent, and Distributed Systems 20 (1) (2005); A. Shahrabi, M. Ould-Khoua, On the communication latency of wormhole routed interconnection networks, International Journal of Simulation 4 (5–6) (2003) 32–43; A. Shahrabi, L. Mackenzie, M. Ould-Khoua, Modelling of Adaptive Wormhole-Routed Hypercubes in the Presence of Broadcast Traffic, in: N.J. Dimopoulos, K.F. Li (Eds.), Chapter 10 in High Performance Computing Systems And Applications, Kluwer Academic Publishers, Boston, 2002; A. Shahrabi, M. Ould-Khoua, L. Mackenzie, An Analytical Model of Wormhole-Routed Hypercubes under Broadcast Traffic, Performance Evaluation 53 (1) (2003) 23–42; A. Shahrabi, M. Ould-Khoua, L. Mackenzie, Latency of double-tree broadcast in wormhole-routed hypercubes, in: Proceedings of International Conference on Parallel Processing (ICPP’01), IEEE Computer Society, 2001, pp. 401–408] a comparative performance study of adaptive and deterministic routing algorithms in wormhole-switched interconnection networks carrying a broadcast traffic component and investigates the performance vicissitudes of them under a variety of network operating conditions. In contrast to previous works, which have reported superiority of adaptive over deterministic routing especially in high-dimensional networks such as hypercubes, our results show that adaptivity does not necessarily improve network performance even for high-dimensional networks and its superiority starts to deteriorate as the broadcast fraction of generated traffic increases.     

Modbus通信协议在分布式控制系统中的应用

文就一种DCS与PLC作为上下位机的分布式控制系统,介绍基于Modbus协议的通信网络在其中的应用,以及该网络的硬件构成及程序设计。     

A characterization of average case communication complexity

It is well known that the average case deterministic communication complexity is bounded below by an entropic quantity, which one would now call deterministic information complexity. In this paper we show a corresponding upper bound. We also improve known lower bounds for the public coin Las Vegas communication complexity by a constant factor.