We will review some of the major results in random graphs and some of the more challenging open problems. We will cover algorithmic and structural questions. We will touch on newer models, including those related to the WWW.

Random graphs

Praise for the Third Edition: "This is one of the best books available. Its excellent organizational structure allows quick reference to specific models and its clear presentation . . . solidifies the understanding of the concepts being presented."IIE Transactions on Operations EngineeringThoroughly revised and expanded to reflect the latest developments in the field, Fundamentals of Queueing Theory, Fourth Edition continues to present the basic statistical principles that are necessary to analyze the probabilistic nature of queues. Rather than presenting a narrow focus on the subject, this update illustrates the wide-reaching, fundamental concepts in queueing theory and its applications to diverse areas such as computer science, engineering, business, and operations research.This update takes a numerical approach to understanding and making probable estimations relating to queues, with a comprehensive outline of simple and more advanced queueing models. Newly featured topics of the Fourth Edition include:Retrial queuesApproximations for queueing networksNumerical inversion of transformsDetermining the appropriate number of servers to balance quality and cost of serviceEach chapter provides a self-contained presentation of key concepts and formulae, allowing readers to work with each section independently, while a summary table at the end of the book outlines the types of queues that have been discussed and their results. In addition, two new appendices have been added, discussing transforms and generating functions as well as the fundamentals of differential and difference equations. New examples are now included along with problems that incorporate QtsPlus software, which is freely available via the book's related Web site.With its accessible style and wealth of real-world examples, Fundamentals of Queueing Theory, Fourth Edition is an ideal book for courses on queueing theory at the upper-undergraduate and graduate levels. It is also a valuable resource for researchers and practitioners who analyze congestion in the fields of telecommunications, transportation, aviation, and management science.

Fundamentals of Queueing Theory

To be agile and cost effective, data centers should allow dynamic resource allocation across large server pools. In particular, the data center network should enable any server to be assigned to any service. To meet these goals, we present VL2, a practical network architecture that scales to support huge data centers with uniform high capacity between servers, performance isolation between services, and Ethernet layer-2 semantics. VL2 uses (1) flat addressing to allow service instances to be placed anywhere in the network, (2) Valiant Load Balancing to spread traffic uniformly across network paths, and (3) end-system based address resolution to scale to large server pools, without introducing complexity to the network control plane. VL2's design is driven by detailed measurements of traffic and fault data from a large operational cloud service provider. VL2's implementation leverages proven network technologies, already available at low cost in high-speed hardware implementations, to build a scalable and reliable network architecture. As a result, VL2 networks can be deployed today, and we have built a working prototype. We evaluate the merits of the VL2 design using measurement, analysis, and experiments. Our VL2 prototype shuffles 2.7 TB of data among 75 servers in 395 seconds - sustaining a rate that is 94% of the maximum possible.

/pdf/vl2-a-scalable-and-flexible-data-center-network-dkbtxdift1.pdf

VL2: a scalable and flexible data center network

We analyze 20 large sets of actual variable-bit-rate (VBR) video data, generated by a variety of different codecs and representing a wide range of different scenes. Performing extensive statistical and graphical tests, our main conclusion is that long-range dependence is an inherent feature of VBR video traffic, i.e., a feature that is independent of scene (e.g., video phone, video conference, motion picture video) and codec. In particular, we show that the long-range dependence property allows us to clearly distinguish between our measured data and traffic generated by VBR source models currently used in the literature. These findings give rise to novel and challenging problems in traffic engineering for high-speed networks and open up new areas of research in queueing and performance analysis involving long-range dependent traffic models. A small number of analytic queueing results already exist, and we discuss their implications for network design and network control strategies in the presence of long-range dependent traffic. >

Long-range dependence in variable-bit-rate video traffic

To be agile and cost effective, data centers must allow dynamic resource allocation across large server pools. In particular, the data center network should provide a simple flat abstraction: it should be able to take any set of servers anywhere in the data center and give them the illusion that they are plugged into a physically separate, noninterfering Ethernet switch with as many ports as the service needs. To meet this goal, we present VL2, a practical network architecture that scales to support huge data centers with uniform high capacity between servers, performance isolation between services, and Ethernet layer-2 semantics. VL2 uses (1) flat addressing to allow service instances to be placed anywhere in the network, (2) Valiant Load Balancing to spread traffic uniformly across network paths, and (3) end system--based address resolution to scale to large server pools without introducing complexity to the network control plane. VL2's design is driven by detailed measurements of traffic and fault data from a large operational cloud service provider. VL2's implementation leverages proven network technologies, already available at low cost in high-speed hardware implementations, to build a scalable and reliable network architecture. As a result, VL2 networks can be deployed today, and we have built a working prototype. We evaluate the merits of the VL2 design using measurement, analysis, and experiments. Our VL2 prototype shuffles 2.7 TB of data among 75 servers in 395 s---sustaining a rate that is 94% of the maximum possible.

In this paper, we prove a necessary and sufficient condition for the construction of 2-to-1 optical buffered first-in-first-out (FIFO) multiplexers by a single crossbar switch and fiber delay lines. We consider a feedback system consisting of an (M+2)times(M+2) crossbar switch and M fiber delay lines with delays d1,d2,...,dM. These M fiber delay lines are connected from M outputs of the crossbar switch back to M inputs of the switch, leaving two inputs (respectively, two outputs) of the switch for the two inputs (respectively, two outputs) of the 2-to-1 multiplexer. The main contribution of this paper is the formal proof that d1=1 and di les di+1 les 2d i, i=1,2,...,M-1, is a necessary and sufficient condition on the delays d1,d2,...,dM for such a feedback system to be operated as a 2-to-1 FIFO multiplexer with buffer Sigmai=1 Mdi under a simple packet routing policy. Specifically, the routing of a packet is according to a specific decomposition of the packet delay, called the C- transform in this paper. Our result shows that under such a feedback architecture a 2-to-1 FIFO multiplexer can be constructed with M=O(log B), where B is the buffer size. Therefore, our construction improves on a more complicated construction recently proposed by Sarwate and Anantharam that requires M=O(radicB) under the same feedback architecture (we note that their design is more general and works for priority queues)

A Necessary and Sufficient Condition for the Construction of 2-to-1 Optical FIFO Multiplexers by a Single Crossbar Switch and Fiber Delay Lines

Automatically recognizing personality based on historical action logs in online social networks is a promising method to infer a person's behaviors, and it has received a lot of attention lately as it might lead to the construction of a better personal recommendation system. However, very few previous works in the literature put their focus on predicting personality from Chinese texts. As Chinese texts are much more difficult to delimit than English texts, it poses more challenges in recognizing personality from Chinese texts. In this paper, we attempt to classify the personality traits from Chinese texts. We collected a dataset with posts and personality scores of 222 Facebook users who use Chinese as their main written language. Then, we used Jieba, a Chinese text segmentation tool, as the tokenizer for the task of text segmentation, and the Support Vector Machine (SVM) as the learning algorithm for personality classification. Our experimental results show that the performance in precision and recall can be significantly improved with the help of text segmentation. Moreover, exploiting side information, such as the number of friends, could improve the performance further. One interesting finding from our experiments is that extraverts seem to write more sentences and use more common words than introverts. This indicates that extraverts are more willing to share their mood and life with others than introverts.

/pdf/predicting-personality-traits-of-chinese-users-based-on-4ahljpfgzb.pdf

Predicting personality traits of Chinese users based on Facebook wall posts

The capacity of a power controlled wireless network can be changing due to user’s mobility, fading or shadowing effects. As a result, the quality of service (QOS) of users accepted by call admission control may not be guaranteed in a wireless network. In this paper, we propose a two-phase distributed scheduling algorithm to identify a subset of wireless users whose QOS is guaranteed. In the first phase, each link transmits with a probing power and each user determines whether it can be a member of the basic feasible set or not in a distributed manner. In the second phase, we develop a generalized call admission control algorithm that attempts to merge as many as possible the rest links into the basic feasible set. We consider a variation that attempts to enlarge the set of feasible links. For starvation prevention, we discuss conflict resolution in the power domain and in the time domain. Through simulation we evaluate the performance of the proposed scheme in terms of average execution time, average packet delay and maximum of the cycle time.

A Joint Design of Distributed QoS Scheduling and Power Control for Wireless Networks

In the literature, research has been published extensively on how one achieves exact emulation of First In First Out (FIFO) multiplexers for fixed-size cells (or packets) using optical crossbar Switches and fiber Delay Lines (SDL). In this paper, we go a step further and propose a new architecture that achieves exact emulation of FIFO multiplexers for variable length bursts. Our architecture consists of two blocks: a cell-scheduling block and a FIFO multiplexer for fixed-size cells. Both blocks are made of SDI, units. The objective of the cell-scheduling block is to schedule cells in a burst to the right input at the right time so that cells in the same burst depart contiguously from the multiplexer for fixed-size cells. We show that cell scheduling can be done efficiently by keeping track of a single state variable, called the total virtual waiting time in this paper. Moreover, the delay through the cell-scheduling block is bounded above by a constant that only depends on the number of inputs and the maximum number of cells in a burst. Such a delay bound provides a limit on the number of fiber delay lines needed in the cell-scheduling block

/pdf/using-switched-delay-lines-for-exact-emulation-of-fifo-27t943v4wr.pdf

Using switched delay lines for exact emulation of FIFO multiplexers with variable length bursts

In this paper, we consider the construction of an optical priority queue with a single (M+1)times(M+1) switch and M fiber delay lines. The M fiber delay lines are connected from M outputs of the switch back to M inputs of the switch, leaving one input (resp. output) of the switch for the input (resp. output) of the priority queue. It was known that with an appropriate choice of the lengths of the delay lines, such a construction can be used for exact emulation of an optical priority queue with O(M2) buffer size. In this paper, we show that the buffer size can be further extended to O(M3) using the same construction. The improvement relies on establishing a partial ordering for all the packets stored in the delay lines.

Duan-Shin Lee

Papers

A Necessary and Sufficient Condition for the Construction of 2-to-1 Optical FIFO Multiplexers by a Single Crossbar Switch and Fiber Delay Lines

Predicting personality traits of Chinese users based on Facebook wall posts

A Joint Design of Distributed QoS Scheduling and Power Control for Wireless Networks

Using switched delay lines for exact emulation of FIFO multiplexers with variable length bursts

Using a Single Switch with O(M) Inputs/Outputs for the Construction of an Optical Priority Queue with O(M 3 ) Buffer