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

Certain data-communication protocols hog the spotlight, but all of them have a lot in common. Computer Networking: A Top-Down Approach Featuring the Internet explains the engineering problems that are inherent in communicating digital information from point to point. The top-down approach mentioned in the subtitle means that the book starts at the top of the protocol stack--at the application layer--and works its way down through the other layers, until it reaches bare wire. The authors, for the most part, shun the well-known seven-layer Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) protocol stack in favor of their own five-layer (application, transport, network, link, and physical) model. It's an effective approach that helps clear away some of the hand waving traditionally associated with the more obtuse layers in the OSI model. The approach is definitely theoretical--don't look here for instructions on configuring Windows 2000 or a Cisco router--but it's relevant to reality, and should help anyone who needs to understand networking as a programmer, system architect, or even administration guru.The treatment of the network layer, at which routing takes place, is typical of the overall style. In discussing routing, authors James Kurose and Keith Ross explain (by way of lots of clear, definition-packed text) what routing protocols need to do: find the best route to a destination. Then they present the mathematics that determine the best path, show some code that implements those algorithms, and illustrate the logic by using excellent conceptual diagrams. Real-life implementations of the algorithms--including Internet Protocol (both IPv4 and IPv6) and several popular IP routing protocols--help you to make the transition from pure theory to networking technologies. --David WallTopics covered: The theory behind data networks, with thorough discussion of the problems that are posed at each level (the application layer gets plenty of attention). For each layer, there's academic coverage of networking problems and solutions, followed by discussion of real technologies. Special sections deal with network security and transmission of digital multimedia.

Computer Networking: A Top-Down Approach

Modern Graph Theory

The book reviews section generally accepts for review only those books whose content and level reflect the general editorial policy of Technometrics. Publishers are invited to send books for review to Eric R. Ziegel, Amoco Research Center, Mail Station F-l/C& P.O. Box 3011, Naperville, Illinois 60566-7011. Please include the price of the book. The opinions expressed in this section are those of the reviewers and do not necessarily reflect those of the editorial staff or the sponsoring societies. Listed prices were provided by the publisher when the books were received by Technometrics and may not be current.

Adventures in Stochastic Processes

Peer-to-peer protocols play an increasingly instrumental role in Internet content distribution. It is therefore important to gain a complete understanding of how these protocols behave in practice and how their operating parameters affect overall system performance. This paper presents the first detailed experimental investigation of the peer selection strategy in the popular BitTorrent protocol. By observing more than 40 nodes in instrumented private torrents, we validate three protocol properties that, though believed to hold, have not been previously demonstrated experimentally: the clustering of similar-bandwidth peers, the effectiveness of BitTorrent's sharing incentives, and the peers' high uplink utilization. In addition, we observe that BitTorrent's modified choking algorithmin seed state provides uniform service to all peers, and that an underprovisioned initial seed leads to absence of peer clustering and less effective sharing incentives. Based on our results, we provide guidelines for seed provisioning by content providers, and discuss a tracker protocol extension that addresses an identified limitation of the protocol.

/pdf/clustering-and-sharing-incentives-in-bittorrent-systems-2dc0niytpm.pdf

Clustering and sharing incentives in BitTorrent systems

Internet Video Data Streaming

From the previous chapter, we can see that for a video streaming CDN like Youku, there exists an inherent conflict between improving the CDN’s energy efficiency and preserving its ISP-friendly server selection policy. In this chapter, we present a formal description of the problem, and propose a cost-aware capacity provisioning algorithm that can dynamically plan the CDN’s service capacities in its clusters for saving the overall operating cost.

Ye Tian

Papers

Internet Video Data Streaming

Capacity Provisioning for Video Content Delivery