When designing a multimedia server, several things must be decided: which scheduling scheme to adopt, how to allocate multimedia objects on storage devices, and the round length with which the streams will be serviced. Several problems in the designing of large-scale multimedia servers are addressed, with the following contributions: (1) a striping scheme is proposed that minimizes the number of seeks and hence maximizes the performance; (2) a simple and efficient mechanism is presented to find the optimal striping unit size as well as the optimal round length, which exploits both the characteristics of VBR streams and the situation of resources in the system; and (3) the characteristics and resource requirements of several scheduling schemes are investigated in order to obtain a clear indication as to which scheme shows the best performance in realtime multimedia servicing. Based on our analysis and experimental results, the CSCAN scheme outperforms the other schemes. It is believed that the results are of value in the design of effective large-scale multimedia servers.

The problem of differentiated Multi-Layer Integrated Survivability (MLIS) in IP over WDM networks is studied, which is decomposed into three sub-problems: survivable strategies design (SSD), spare capacity dimensioning (SCD), and dynamic survivable routing (DSR). A related work of network survivability in IP over WDM networks is firstly provided, and adaptive survivable strategies are also designed. A new Integrated Shared Pool (ISP) approach for SCD is then proposed, which is formulated by using integer-programming theory. Moreover, a novel survivable routing scheme called Differentiated Integrated Survivability Algorithm (DISA) for DSR is developed. Simulation results show that the proposed integrated survivability scheme performs much better than other solutions (e.g., "highest layer recovery" and "lowest layer recovery" schemes) in terms of traffic blocking ratio, spare resource requirement, and average traffic recovery ratio in IP over WDM networks.

Recently a number of multicast routing protocols for ad hoc networks have been proposed, however, most of them do not provide proper tradeoffs between effectiveness, efficiency and scalability. In this paper, a novel multicast routing protocol is presented for ad hoc networks. The protocol, termed as dynamic-ring-based multicast routing protocol (DRMR), uses the concept of dynamic ring whose radius can be adjusted dynamically and DRMR configures this type of ring for all group member nodes. According to the principle of zone routing, two nodes whose rings overlap can create route to each other, thus, when the ring graph composed of all rings is connected, each member node has one or more routes to others. DRMR uses the method of expanding ring search (ERS) to maintain the connected ring graph, and also can decrease the radius of the ring to reduce the overhead. The performances of DRMR were simulated and evaluated with NS2, and results show that DRMR has a high data packet delivery ratio, low control overhead and good scalability.

Wireless transmission is becoming increasing ubiquitous, but there is a big black hole in the security of this kind of network. Although IEEE 802.11 provides an optional Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP) to implement the authentication and confidentiality, it leaves a lot of vulnerabilities and threats. This paper proposes a protocol called SPRNG for wireless data-link layer security. SPRNG is based on the sender and receiver who generate in a synchronized way a pseudo-random number sequence. In each transmission, the sender and receiver use a pair of random numbers, one for data frame authentication, and the other for encryption key. The random numbers are used as "one-time passwords" for sender authentication and as fresh encryption keys for each frame. SPRNG is designed to be compatible with the existing 802.11 products. Like WEP, the current 802.11 security protocol, SPRNG uses a symmetric key as its seed. SPRNG has already been simulated and tested in experiment, it shows that SPRNG has stronger security than WEP because it reveals little information for attackers. The key problem of SPRNG, synchronization loss problem, is also presented. Though motivated by wireless security, SPRNG is generic for many other applications, especially in the point to point communication.

Automatic content analysis of sports videos is a valuable and challenging task. Motivated by analogies between a class of sports videos and languages, the authors propose a novel approach for sports video analysis based on compiler principles. It integrates both semantic analysis and syntactic analysis to automatically create an index and a table of contents for a sports video. Each shot of the video sequence is first annotated and indexed with semantic labels through detection of events using domain knowledge. A grammar-based parser is then constructed to identify the tree structure of the video content based on the labels. Meanwhile, the grammar can be used to detect and recover errors during the analysis. As a case study, a sports video parsing system is presented in the particular domain of diving. Experimental results indicate the proposed approach is effective.

This paper is about distributed oblivious function evaluation (DOFE). In this setting one party (Alice) has a function f(x), and the other party (Bob) with an input alpha wants to learn f(alpha) in an oblivious way with the help of a set of servers. What Alice should do is to share her secret function f(x) among the servers. Bob obtains what he should get by interacting with the servers. This paper proposes the model and security requirements for DOFE and analyzes three distributed oblivious polynomial evaluation protocols presented in the paper.

This paper presents a novel framework for IP Differentiated Services (DiffServ) over optical burst switching (OBS), namely, DS-OBS. The network architecture, functional model of edge nodes and core nodes, the control packet format, a novel burst assembly scheme at ingress nodes and scheduling algorithm of core nodes are presented. The basic idea is to apply DiffServ capable burst assembly at ingress nodes and perform different per hop behavior (PHB) electronic treatments for control packets of different QoS class services at core nodes. Simulation results show that the proposed schemes can provide the best differentiated service for expedited forwarding (EF), assured forwarding (AF) and best effort (BE) services in terms of end-to-end delay, throughput and IP packet loss probability.

A new classification of path-delay fault testability in a combinational circuit is presented in terms of testability of stuck-at faults in an equivalent circuit. Earlier results describing correlation of path-delay and stuck-at faults are either incomplete, or use a complex model of equivalent circuit based on timing parameters. It is shown here that a path-delay fault (rising or falling) is testable if and only if certain single or multiple stuck-at fault in the equivalent circuit is testable. Thus, all aspects of path-delay faults related to testability under various classification schemes can be interpreted using the stuck-at fault model alone. The results unify most of the existing concepts and provide a better understanding of path-delay faults in logic circuits.

Without any additional cost, all the disks on the nodes of a cluster can be connected together through CEFT-PVFS, an RAID-10 style parallel file system, to provide a multi-GB/s parallel I/O performance. I/O response time is one of the most important measures of quality of service for a client. When multiple clients submit data-intensive jobs at the same time, the response time experienced by the user is an indicator of the power of the cluster. In this paper, a queuing model is used to analyze in detail the average response time when multiple clients access CEFT-PVFS. The results reveal that response time is with a function of several operational parameters. The results show that I/O response time decreases with the increases in I/O buffer hit rate for read requests, write buffer size for write requests and the number of server nodes in the parallel file system, while the higher the I/O requests arrival rate, the longer the I/O response time. On the other hand, the collective power of a large cluster supported by CEFT-PVFS is shown to be able to sustain a steady and stable I/O response time for a relatively large range of the request arrival rate.

This paper proposes an authentication scheme for JPEG images based on digital signature and semi-fragile watermarking. It can detect and locate malicious manipulations made to the image, and verify the ownership of the image at the same time. The algorithm uses the invariance of the order relationship between two DCT coefficients before and after JPEG compression to embed image content dependent watermark, therefore the watermark can survive the JPEG lossy compression. Since the scheme is based on the security of the cryptographic hash function and public key algorithm, it is believed to be secure to the extent that cryptography is believed to be. Theoretical analysis and experimental results show that the proposed scheme has the desired property and good performance for image authentication.

Bounded Slice-line Grid (BSG) is an elegant representation of block placement, because it is very intuitionistic and has the advantage of handling various placement constraints. However, BSG has attracted little attention because its evaluation is very time-consuming. This paper proposes a simple algorithm independent of the BSG size to evaluate the BSG representation in O(nloglog n) time, where n is the number of blocks. In the algorithm, the BSG-rooms are assigned with integral coordinates firstly, and then a linear sorting algorithm is applied on the BSG-rooms where blocks are assigned to compute two block sequences, from which the block placement can be obtained in O(nloglog n) time. As a consequence, the evaluation of the BSG is completed in O(nloglog n) time, where n is the number of blocks. The proposed algorithm is much faster than the previous graph-based O(n^2) algorithm. The experimental results demonstrate the efficiency of the algorithm.

In completeness theories of multiple-valued logic, the characterization of Sheffer functions is an important issue. The solution can be reduced to determining the minimal coverings of precomplete classes. In this paper, some Full Symmetric Function Sets (m=3) are proved to be components of the minimal covering of precomplete classes in Pk^*.

The knapsack problem is well known to be NP-complete. Due to its importance in cryptosystem and in number theory, in the past two decades, much effort has been made in order to find techniques that could lead to practical algorithms with reasonable running time. This paper proposes a new parallel algorithm for the knapsack problem where the optimal merging algorithm is adopted. The proposed algorithm is based on an EREW-SIMD machine with shared memory. It is proved that the proposed algorithm is both optimal and the first without memory conflicts algorithm for the knapsack problem. The comparisons of algorithm performance show that it is an improvement over the past researches.

A new Some-Read-Any-Write (SRAW) fault tolerant algorithm for redundant services is presented that allows a system to adjust failures dynamically in order to keep the availability and improve the performance. SRAW is based upon dynamic and active load balancing. By introducing dynamic and active load balancing scheme into redundant services, not only the processing speed of requests can be greatly improved, but also the load balancing can be simply and efficiently achieved. Integrated with consistency protocol in this paper, SRAW can also be applied to state services. The performance of SRAW algorithm is also analyzed, and comparisons with other fault tolerant algorithms, especially with RAWA, indicate that SRAW efficiently improves the performance of redundant services with guaranteeing system availability.

Interactive proof and zero-knowledge proof systems are two important concepts in cryptography and complexity theory. In the past two decades, a great number of interactive proof and zero-knowledge proof protocols have been designed and applied in practice. In this paper, a simple memorizable zero-knowledge protocol is proposed for graph non-isomorphism problem, based on the memorizable interactive proof system, which is extended from the original definition of interactive proof and is more applicable in reality.

This paper investigates a preemptive semi-online scheduling problem on m identical parallel machines where m=2,3. It is assumed that all jobs have their processing times in between p and rp ( p > 0, r >= 1). The goal is to minimize the makespan. Best possible algorithms are designed for any r >= 1 when m=2,3.

This work is focused on presenting a split precondition approach for the modeling and proving the correctness of distributed algorithms. Formal specification and precise analysis of Peterson's distributed mutual exclusion algorithm for two process has been considered. The proof of properties like, mutual exclusion, liveness, and lockout-freedom have also been presented.

It is argued that some symmetric structure in logic programs could be taken into account when implementing semantics in logic programming. This may enhance the declarative ability or expressive power of the semantics. The work presented here may be seen as representative examples along this line. The focus is on the derivation of negative information and some other classic semantic issues. We first define a permutation group associated with a given logic program. Since usually the canonical models used to reflect the common sense or intended meaning are minimal or completed models of the program, we expose the relationships between minimal models and completed models of the original program and its so-called G-reduced form newly-derived via the permutation group defined. By means of this G-reduced form, we introduce a rule to assume negative information termed G-CWA, which is actually a generalization of the GCWA. We also develop the notions of G-definite, G-hierarchical and G-stratified logic programs, which are more general than definite, hierarchical and stratified programs, and extend some well-known declarative and procedural semantics to them, respectively.

With the purpose of making the verification of parameterized system more general and easier, in this paper, a new and intuitive language PSL (Parameterized-system Specification Language) is proposed to specify a class of parameterized synchronous systems. From a PSL script, an automatic method is proposed to generate a constraint-based symbolic model. The model can concisely symbolically represent the collections of global states by counting the number of processes in a given state. Moreover, a theorem has been proved that there is a simulation relation between the original system and its symbolic model. Since the abstract and symbolic techniques are exploited in the symbolic model, state-explosion problem in traditional verification methods is efficiently avoided. Based on the proposed symbolic model, a reachability analysis procedure is implemented using ANSI C++ on UNIX platform. Thus, a complete tool for verifying the parameterized synchronous systems is obtained and tested for some cases. The experimental results show that the method is satisfactory.

This paper presents a complete method to prove geometric theorem by decomposing the corresponding polynomial system into strong regular sets, by which one can compute some components for which the geometry theorem is true and exclude other components for which the geometry theorem is false. Two examples are given to show that the geometry theorems are conditionally true for some components which are excluded by other methods.

In this paper an event-based operational interleaving semantics is proposed for real-time processes, for which action refinement and a denotational true concurrency semantics are developed and defined in terms of timed event structures. The authors characterize the timed event traces that are generated by the operational semantics in a denotational way, and show that this operational semantics is consistent with the denotational semantics in the sense that they generate the same set of timed event traces, thereby eliminating the gap between the true concurrency and interleaving semantics.

A type checking method for the functional language LFC is presented. A distinct feature of LFC is that it uses Context-Free (CF) languages as data types to represent compound data structures. This makes LFC a dynamically typed language. To improve efficiency, a practical type checking method is presented, which consists of both static and dynamic type checking. Although the inclusion relation of CF languages is not decidable, a special subset of the relation is decidable, I.e., the sentential form relation, which can be statically checked. Moreover, most of the expressions in actual LFC programs appear to satisfy this relation according to the statistic data of experiments. So, despite that the static type checking is not complete, it undertakes most of the type checking task. Consequently the run-time efficiency is effectively improved. Another feature of the type checking is that it converts the expressions with implicit structures to structured representation. Structure reconstruction technique is presented.

Program slicing can be effectively used to debug, test, analyze, understand and maintain object-oriented software. In this paper, a new slicing model is proposed to slice Java programs based on their inherent hierarchical feature. The main idea of hierarchical slicing is to slice programs in a stepwise way, from package level, to class level, method level, and finally up to statement level. The stepwise slicing algorithm and the related graph reachability algorithms are presented, the architecture of the Java program Analyzing Tool (JATO) based on hierarchical slicing model is provided, the applications and a small case study are also discussed.

Classes are the basic modules in object-oriented (OO) software, which consist of attributes and methods. Thus, in OO environment, the cohesion is mainly about the tightness of the attributes and methods of classes. This paper discusses the relationships between attributes and attributes, attributes and methods, methods and methods of a class based on dependence analysis. Then the paper presents methods to compute these dependencies. Based on these, the paper proposes a method to measure the class cohesion, which satisfies the properties that a good measurement should have. The approach overcomes the limitations of previous class cohesion measures, which consider only one or two of the three relationships in a class.

Mining frequent patterns from datasets is one of the key success of data mining research. Currently, most of the studies focus on the data sets in which the elements are independent, such as the items in the marketing basket. However, the objects in the real world often have close relationship with each other. How to extract frequent patterns from these relations is the objective of this paper. The authors use graphs to model the relations, and select a simple type for analysis. Combining the graph theory and algorithms to generate frequent patterns, a new algorithm called Topology, which can mine these graphs efficiently, has been proposed. The performance of the algorithm is evaluated by doing experiments with synthetic datasets and real data. The experimental results show that Topology can do the job well. At the end of this paper, the potential improvement is mentioned.

Mining frequent patterns has been studied popularly in data mining area. However, little work has been done on mining patterns when the database has an influx of fresh data constantly. In these dynamic scenarios, efficient maintenance of the discovered patterns is crucial. Most existing methods need to scan the entire database repeatedly, which is an obvious disadvantage. In this paper, an efficient incremental mining algorithm, Incremental-Mining (IM), is proposed for maintenance of the frequent patterns when new incremental data come. Based on the frequent pattern tree (FP-tree) structure, IM gives a way to make the most of the things from the previous mining process, and requires scanning the original data once at most. Furthermore, IM can identify directly the differential set of frequent patterns, which may be more informative to users. Moreover, IM can deal with changing thresholds as well as changing data, thus provide a full maintenance scheme. IM has been implemented and the performance study shows it outperforms three other incremental algorithms: FUP, DB-tree and re-running frequent pattern growth (FP-growth).

Combinatorial optimization problems are found in many application fields such as computer science, engineering and economy. In this paper, a new efficient meta-heuristic, Intersection-Based Scaling (IBS for abbreviation), is proposed and it can be applied to the combinatorial optimization problems. The main idea of IBS is to scale the size of the instance based on the intersection of some local optima, and to simplify the search space by extracting the intersection from the instance, which makes the search more efficient. The combination of IBS with some local search heuristics of different combinatorial optimization problems such as Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP) and Graph Partitioning Problem (GPP) is studied, and comparisons are made with some of the best heuristic algorithms and meta-heuristic algorithms. It is found that it has significantly improved the performance of existing local search heuristics and significantly outperforms the known best algorithms.

In this paper, a computational effective heuristic method for solving the minimum makespan problem of job shop scheduling is presented. It is based on taboo search procedure and on the shifting bottleneck procedure used to jump out of the trap of the taboo search procedure. A key point of the algorithm is that in the taboo search procedure two taboo lists are used to forbid two kinds of reversals of arcs, which is a new and effective way in taboo search methods for job shop scheduling. Computational experiments on a set of benchmark problem instances show that, in several cases, the approach, in reasonable time, yields better solutions than the other heuristic procedures discussed in the literature.

The problem of efficiently monitoring the network flow is regarded as the problem to find out the minimum weighted weak vertex cover set for a given graph G=(V, E). In this paper, we give an approximation algorithm to solve it, which has the approximation ratio ln d + 1, where d is the maximum degree of the vertex in graph G, and improve the previous work.

The max-flow problem in planar networks with only edge capacities has been proved to be in NC (Nickle's Class). This paper considers a more general version of the problem when the nodes as well as the edges have capacities. In a general network, the node-edge-capacity problem can be easily reduced to the edge-capacity problem. But in the case of planar network this reduction may destroy the planarity, and reduces the problem to the edge-capacity problem in a general network, which is P-complete. A recent contribution presents a new reduction for planar networks, that maintains the planarity. In this paper, it is proved that this reduction is in NC and thus the node-edge-capacity problem in undirected planar networks is in NC.

A special case of the bottleneck Steiner tree problem in the Euclidean plane was considered in this paper. The problem has applications in the design of wireless communication networks, multifacility location, VLSI routing and network routing. For the special case which requires that there should be no edge connecting any two Steiner points in the optimal solution, a 3-restricted Steiner tree can be found indicating the existence of the performance ratio sqrt(2). In this paper, the special case of the problem is proved to be NP-hard and cannot be approximated within ratio sqrt(2). First a simple polynomial time approximation algorithm with performance ratio sqrt(3) is presented. Then based on this algorithm and the existence of the 3-restricted Steiner tree, a polynomial time approximation algorithm with performance ratio---sqrt(2)+epsilon is proposed, for any epsilon > 0 .