Y. C. Tay

A capacity analysis for the IEEE 802.11 MAC protocol

The IEEE 802.11 MAC protocol provides shared access to a wireless channel. This paper uses an analytic model to study the channel capacity – i.e., maximum throughput – when using the basic access (two-way handshaking) method in this protocol. It provides closed-form approximations for the probability of collision p, the maximum throughput S and the limit on the number of stations in a wireless cell.The analysis also shows that: p does not depend on the packet length, the latency in crossing the MAC and physical layers, the acknowledgment timeout, the interframe spaces and the slot size; p and S (and other performance measures) depend on the minimum window size W and the number of stations n only through a gap g=W/(n−1) – consequently, halving W is like doubling n; the maximum contention window size has minimal effect on p and S; the choice of W that maximizes S is proportional to the square root of the packet length; S is maximum when transmission rate (including collisions) equals the reciprocal of transmission time, and this happens when channel wastage due to collisions balances idle bandwidth caused by backoffs.The results suggest guidelines on when and how W can be adjusted to suit measured traffic, thus making the protocol adaptive.

AMRIS: a multicast protocol for ad hoc wireless networks

This paper introduces AMRIS, a new multicast routing protocol for ad hoc wireless networks. AMRIS (Ad hoc Multicast Routing protocol utilizing Increasing id-numberS) is designed to operate independently of underlying unicast protocols. The idea behind AMRIS is to dynamically assign every node (on demand) in a multicast session with an id-number. The ordering between id-numbers is used to direct the multicast flow, and the sparseness among them used for quick connectivity repair. A multicast delivery tree rooted at a special node called Sid joins up the nodes participating in the multicast session. The relationship between the id-numbers (and the nodes that own them) and Sid is that the id-numbers increase in numerical value as they radiate from Sid in the delivery tree. These id-numbers help the nodes dynamically leave and join a session, as well as adapt rapidly to changes in link connectivity (due to mobility etc.). Messages to repair a link breakage are confined to the region where it occurs. AMRIS is simulated with PARSEC and the results reported.

Locking performance in centralized databases

An analytic model is used to study the performance of dynamic locking. The analysis uses only the steady-state average values of the variables. The solution to the model is given by a cubic, which has exactly one valid root for the range of parametric values that is of interest. The models predictions agree well with simulation results for transactions that require up to twenty locks. The model separates data contention from resource contention, thus facilitating an analysis of their separate effects and their interaction. It shows that systems with a particular form of nonuniform access, or with shared locks, are equivalent to systems with uniform access and only exclusive locks. Blocking due to conflicts is found to impose an upper bound on transaction throughput; this fact leads to a rule of thumb on how much data contention should be permitted in a system. Throughput can exceed this bound if a transaction is restarted whenever it encounters a conflict, provided restart costs and resource contention are low. It can also be exceeded by making transactions predeclare their locks. Raising the multiprogramming level to increase throughput also raises the number of restarts per completion. Transactions should minimize their lock requests, because data contention is proportional to the square of the number of requests. The choice of how much data to lock at a time depends on which part of a general granularity curve the system sees.

Sift: a MAC protocol for event-driven wireless sensor networks

Nodes in sensor networks often encounter spatially-correlated contention, where multiple nodes in the same neighborhood all sense an event they need to transmit information about. Furthermore, in many sensor network applications, it is sufficient if a subset of the nodes that observe the same event report it. We show that traditional carrier-sense multiple access (CSMA) protocols for sensor networks do not handle the first constraint adequately, and do not take advantage of the second property, leading to degraded latency as the network scales in size. We present Sift, a medium access control (MAC) protocol for wireless sensor networks designed with the above observations in mind. We show using simulations that as the size of the sensor network scales up to 500 nodes, Sift can offer up to a 7-fold latency reduction compared to other protocols, while maintaining competitive throughput.

A mean value performance model for locking in databases: the no-waiting case

A new performance model for dynamic locking is proposed. It is based on a flow diagram and uses only the steady state average values of the variables. It is general enough to handle nonuniform access, shared locks, static locking, multiple transaction classes, and transactions of indeterminate length. The analysis is restricted to the case in which all conflicts are resolved by restarts. It has been shown elsewhere that, under certain conditions, this pure restart policy is as good as, if not better than, a policy that uses both blocking and restarts. The analysis is straightforward, and the computational complexity of the solution, given some nonrestrictive approximations, does not depend on the input parameters. The solution is also well defined and well behaved. The models predictions agree well with simulation results. The model shows that data contention can cause the throughput to thrash, and gives a limit on the workload that will prevent this. It also shows that systems with a particular kind of nonuniform access and systems in which transactions share locks are equivalent to systems in which there is uniform access and only exclusive locking. Static locking has higher throughput, but longer response time, than dynamic locking. Replacing updates by queries in a multiprogramming mix may degrade performance if the queries are longer than the updates.

A utility optimization approach to network cache design

In any caching system, the admission and eviction policies determine which contents are added and removed from a cache when a miss occurs. Usually, these policies are devised so as to mitigate staleness and increase the hit probability. Nonetheless, the utility of having a high hit probability can vary across contents. This occurs, for instance, when service level agreements must be met, or if certain contents are more difficult to obtain than others. In this paper, we propose utility-driven caching, where we associate with each content a utility, which is a function of the corresponding content hit probability. We formulate optimization problems where the objectives are to maximize the sum of utilities over all contents. These problems differ according to the stringency of the cache capacity constraint. Our framework enables us to reverse engineer classical replacement policies such as LRU and FIFO, by computing the utility functions that they maximize. We also develop online algorithms that can be used by service providers to implement various caching policies based on arbitrary utility functions.

Divide-and-conquer approach for the exemplar breakpoint distance

MOTIVATION A one-to-one correspondence between the sets of genes in the two genomes being compared is necessary for the notions of breakpoint and reversal distances. To compare genomes where there are paralogous genes, Sankoff formulated the exemplar distance problem as a general version of the genome rearrangement problem. Unfortunately, the problem is NP-hard even for the breakpoint distance. RESULTS This paper proposes a divide-and-conquer approach for calculating the exemplar breakpoint distance between two genomes with multiple gene families. The combination of our approach and Sankoffs branch-and-bound technique leads to a practical program to answer this question. Tests with both simulated and real datasets show that our program is much more efficient than the existing program that is based only on the branch-and-bound technique. AVAILABILITY Code for the program is available from the authors.

A new approach to dynamic self-tuning of database buffers

Current businesses rely heavily on efficient access to their databases. Manual tuning of these database systems by performance experts is increasingly infeasible: For small companies, hiring an expert may be too expensive; for large enterprises, even an expert may not fully understand the interaction between a large system and its multiple changing workloads. This trend has led major vendors to offer tools that automatically and dynamically tune a database system. Many database tuning knobs concern the buffer pool for caching data and disk pages. Specifically, these knobs control the buffer allocation and thus the cache miss probability, which has direct impact on performance. Previous methods for automatic buffer tuning are based on simulation, black-box control, gradient descent, and empirical equations. This article presents a new approach, using calculations with an analytically-derived equation that relates miss probability to buffer allocation; this equation fits four buffer replacement policies, as well as twelve datasets from mainframes running commercial databases in large corporations. The equation identifies a buffer-size limit that is useful for buffer tuning and powering down idle buffers. It can also replace simulation in predicting I/O costs. Experiments with PostgreSQL illustrate how the equation can help optimize online buffer partitioning, ensure fairness in buffer reclamation, and dynamically retune the allocation when workloads change. It is also used, in conjunction with DB2s interface for retrieving miss data, for tuning DB2 buffer allocation to achieve targets for differentiated service.

A mean value performance model for locking in databases: the waiting case

An earlier paper introduced a simple performance model for studying the behaviour of locking. That paper treats a highly simplified form of locking, called the no waiting case, in which transactions restart when they request locks that are already held by others. This analysis is now extended to the more realistic waiting case, in which transactions are allowed to wait for conflicting locks, and restart only if there is a deadlock. The analysis begins with a system that has uniform access and exclusive locks only. The models predictions for this base system agree well with simulation results. Next, a system with nonuniform access and another with shareable locks are each shown to be reducible to the base system. A comparison of the waiting and no waiting cases yields a surprising result: the throughput for the no waiting case is often better than for the waiting case, and never much worse.

RAT: a quick (and dirty?) push for mobility support

The goal of IP mobility support is to provide the means by which applications on distinct computers are able to communicate when one or both computers have changed their physical network location. Mobile IP (MIP) tries to provide such support with a solution at the network layer. To date, MIP deployment is insignificant and this is likely to remain so, unless there is a breakthrough. In contrast, Network Address Translation (NAT) is a network technology that is widely deployed. The Reverse Address Translation protocol (RAT) attempts to deploy mobility support by riding on this popular proven technology. Registration of the mobile node in RAT is done through existing applications (e.g. browsers) and traffic delivery is by address translation rather than tunneling; thus, the mobile node does not require operating system support or RAT-specific modifications. RAT separates the registration and forwarding functions of the home agent, and does not support handover of connections. RAT is designed to interoperate with MIP, since one of its goals is to act as a bootstrap for encouraging MIP deployment.