Closed-Form Solution for System Availability Distribution

Highly reliable systems with long mission time, that can tolerate no down time, have motivated the study of system reliability. The emergence of fault-tolerant computing systems, where small down times may be tolerable, and preventive and corrective maintenance permitted, motivates a revisit to measures like mean availability. Vendors of computer systems are being required to specify the level of availability that will be met by their systems over a finite time interval, and pay a penalty for non-compliance. Since no closed-form solution has been reported in the literature, numerical approaches have often been used to compute systems availability over a finite time, even for simple Markov models. We report a Laplace transform solution for the distribution of availability over a finite interval, for a semi-Markov model. The transform of the distribution is analytically inverted to obtain a closed-form solution for the corresponding Markov model.     

Exploiting fashion x-commerce through the empowerment of voice in the fashion virtual reality arena

Virtual Reality - The ongoing development of eXtended Reality (XR) technologies is supporting a rapid increase of their performances along with a progressive decrease of their costs, making them...     

Sensitivity analysis of performability

An analytical expression is provided to evaluate the sensitivity (i.e. the derivative with respect to a system parameter) of the cumulative reward distribution for systems modeled by homogeneous Markov reward processes. Both transition rates and reward rates are assumed to be function of the system parameter. An upper bound is also provided for the error introduced by the numerical evaluation of the sensitivity.     

Design and analysis of RT-Ring: a protocol for supporting real-time communications

Distributed applications with quality of service (QoS) requirements are more and more used in several areas (e.g., automated factory networks, embedded systems, conferencing systems). These applications produce a type of traffic with hard timing requirements, i.e., transmissions must be completed within specified deadlines. To handle these transmissions, the communication system must use real-time protocols to provide a communication service that is able to satisfy the QoS requirements of the distributed applications. In this paper, the authors propose a new real-time protocol, called RT-Ring, able to support transmissions of both real-time and generic traffic over a ring network. RT-Ring provides both network guarantees and high network resource utilization, while ensuring the compatibility with the emerging differentiated service architectures. Network guarantees are fully proved and high network utilization is highlighted by a comparative study with the FDDI protocol. This comparison shows that RT-Ring network capacities are greater than the corresponding FDDI capacities. In fact, by assuming the FDDI frames with a length equal to the RT-Ring slot size and by using the same traffic load the authors show that the capacities of FDDI are equal to the lower bound capacities of RT-Ring.     

Bound performance models of heterogeneous parallel processingsystems

Systems of heterogeneous parallel processing are studied such as arising in parallel programs executed on distributed systems. A lower and an upper bound model are suggested to obtain secure lower and upper bounds on the performance of these systems. The bounding models are solved by using a matrix-geometric algorithmic approach. Formal proofs of the bounds are provided along with error bounds on the accuracy of the bounds. These error bounds in turn are reduced to simple computational expressions. Numerical results are included. The results are of interest for application to arbitrary fork-join models with parallel heterogeneous processors and synchronization     

A Distributed Mechanism for Power Saving in IEEE 802.11 Wireless LANs

The finite battery power of mobile computers represents one of the greatest limitations to the utility of portable computers. Furthermore, portable computers often need to perform power consuming activities, such as transmitting and receiving data by means of a random-access, wireless channel. The amount of power consumed to transfer the data on the wireless channel is negatively affected by the channel congestion level, and significantly depends on the MAC protocol adopted. This paper illustrates the design and the performance evaluation of a new mechanism that, by controlling the accesses to the shared transmission channel of a wireless LAN, leads each station to an optimal Power Consumption level. Specifically, we considered the Standard IEEE 802.11 Distributed Coordination Function (DCF) access scheme for WLANs. For this protocol we analytically derived the optimal average Power Consumption levels required for a frame transmission. By exploiting these analytical results, we define a Power Save, Distributed Contention Control (PS-DCC) mechanism that can be adopted to enhance the performance of the Standard IEEE 802.11 DCF protocol from a power saving standpoint. The performance of an IEEE 802.11 network enhanced with the PS-DCC mechanism has been investigated by simulation. Results show that the enhanced protocol closely approximates the optimal power consumption level, and provides a channel utilization close to the theoretical upper bound for the IEEE 802.11 protocol capacity. In addition, even in low load situations, the enhanced protocol does not introduce additional overheads with respect to the standard protocol.     

Cycle time distribution of cyclic networks with blocking

An algorithm is provided to compute the cycle time distribution for cyclic closed exponential queueing networks with N finite capacity nodes and blocking. The blocking phenomenon is due to the nodes with finite capacity queues which can be used to represent systems with limited resources. Moreover, a recursive algorithm is provided to evaluate the cycle time moments, and a closed form solution, both in terms of distribution and moments of the cycle time, is provided for the model under special constraints.     

Performability evaluation of multicomponent fault-tolerant systems

A combined performance and reliability (performability) measure for gracefully degradable fault-tolerant systems is introduced and a closed-form, analytic solution is provided for computing the performability of a class of unrepairable systems which can be modeled by general acyclic Markov processes. This allows the study of models which consider the degradation of more than one type of system component, e.g. processors, memories, buses. An efficient evaluation algorithm is provided, with an extensive analysis of its time and space complexity. A numerical example is provided which shows how the combined performance/reliability measure provides for a complete evaluation of the relative merits of different multiprocessor structures     

Design and performance evaluation of a MAC protocol for wireless local area networks

We propose and analyze, from a performance viewpoint, a Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol for Wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs). The protocol, named Prioritized-Access with Centralized-Control (PACC), supports integrated traffics by guaranteeing an almost complete utilization of network resources. The proposed protocol combines random access for signalling, with collision-free access to the transmission channel. The transmission channel is assumed to be slotted, with slots grouped into frames. Access to transmission slots is controlled by a centralized scheduler which manages a multiclass queue containing the users' requests to access the transmission channel. Three classes of users are assumed: voice traffic (voice), data traffic with real-time constraints (high-priority data), and classical data traffic (low-priority data). A priority mechanism ensures that speech users have the highest priority in accessing the idle slots, since speech packets have a more demanding delay constraint. The remaining channel bandwidth is shared fairly among the high-priority data terminals. The low-priority data terminals use the slots left empty by the other classes. Specifically, access to transmission slots is controlled by the centralized scheduler by managing a transmission cycle for each class of terminals. The voice-terminals cycle has a constant length equal to one frame, while the lengths of the data-terminals cycles are random variables which depend on the number of active voice and data terminals. In this paper we show that the proposed scheme can support the same maximum number of voice terminals as an ideal scheduler, while guaranteeing an almost complete utilization of network capacity. In addition, via a performance analysis, we verify that by limiting the number of real-time data terminals in the network this class of traffic can be statistically guaranteed access delays in the order of 200–300 msec. Hence, the QoS the network gives to the real-time data terminals makes this service suitable for real-time applications such as alarms or low bit rate video. This revised version was published online in June 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.