The paper proposes the PMD method to design an introductory programming practice course plan that is inclusive for all learners and stable throughout a course. To achieve the course plan, the method utilizes personas, each of which represents learners having similar motivation to study programming. The learning of the personas is directed to the course goal with an enforcement resulting from the discipline, which is an integration of effective learning strategies with affective components of the persoans. Under the enforcement, services to facilitate and promote the learning of each persona can be decided, based on motivation components of each persona, motivational effects of the services, and the cycle of self-efficacy. The application of the method on about 500 freshmen in C programming practice course has shown this is a successful approach for designing courses.

A multiple-places reservation discipline is studied in a discrete-time priority queueing system. We obtain the joint distribution of system state, from which the delays of high and low priority packets are derived. Comparison is made with the cases of FIFO, single-place reservation discipline and HOL priority.

With the need and adoption of link aggregation where multiple links exist between two adjacent nodes in order to increase transmission capacity between them, there arise the problems of service guarantee and fair sharing of multiple servers. Although a lot of significant work has been done for single-server scheduling disciplines in the past years, not much work is available for multi-server scheduling disciplines. In this paper, we present and investigate two round robin based multi-server scheduling disciplines, which are Multi-Server Uniform Round Robin (MS-URR) and Multi-Server Deficit Round Robin (MS-DRR). In particular, we analyze their service guarantees and fairness bounds. In addition, we discuss the misordering problem with MS-DRR and present a bound for its misordering probability.

In this paper, we propose a new fair queueing algorithm to improve cell delay variation (CDV) for real-time service categories and to make efficient use of system resources for multimedia traffic in high speed ATM networks. The proposed algorithm is called the delay variation-based fair queueing (DVFQ) algorithm, which is based on per-VC queueing to improve CDV and fairness for each VC of real-time services such as CBR and rt-VBR. In DVFQ algorithm, we define two fairness indexes, which indicate the degree of the fairness of CDV at the rate of each VC, and the degree of impartially sharing the bandwidth between the scheduled cells for each VC. The simulation results for both heavily and lightly loaded conditions show that DVFQ algorithm provides better performances in terms of the CDV, the CDV fairness, and the service fairness than those of FCFS for real-time service.

In order for a service discipline to be used for guaranteed service networks at very high speed, its overall implementation must be scalable while it provides as wide a network schedulability region as possible. From this point of view, GPS-based service disciplines provide a narrow network schedulability region while EDF-based disciplines suffer from the implementation complexities of rate-controllers and admission control. Alternatively, although service disciplines based on service-curves can provide a wider network schedulability region than GPS-based and EDF-based disciplines, they may have even worse implementation complexities than EDF-based disciplines. In this paper, we propose to employ a service discipline based on our specific service-curves. We show that our service discipline has comparable implementation complexity to GPS-based disciplines while providing the same wide network schedulability region that EDF-based disciplines can provide. In fact, this service discipline is an SCED service discipline proposed in [14]. However, our specific service-curves provide the SCED service discipline with the same network schedulability region that EDF-based disciplines can provide, O(1) complexity for deadline calculation, and O(N) complexity for admission control where N is the number of sessions.

In this paper, we study efficient scheduling algorithms that are suitable for ATM networks. In ATM networks, all packets have a fixed small length of 53 bytes and they are transmitted at very high rate. Thus time complexity of a scheduling algorithm is quite important. Most scheduling algorithms proposed so far have a complexity of O(log N) per packet, where N denotes the number of connections sharing the link. In contrast, weighted round robin (WRR) has the advantage of having O(1) complexity; however, it is known that its delay property gets worse as N increases. To solve this problem, in this paper we propose two new variants of WRR, uniform round robin (URR) and idling uniform round robin (I-URR). Both disciplines provide end-to-end delay and fairness bounds which are independent of N. Complexity of URR, however, slightly increases as N increases, while I-URR has complexity of O(1) per packet. I-URR also works as a traffic shaper, so that it can significantly alleviate congestion on the network. We also introduce a hierarchical WRR discipline (H-WRR) which consists of different WRR servers using I-URR as the root server. H-WRR efficiently accommodates both guaranteed and best-effort connections, while maintaining O(1) complexity per packet. If several connections are reserving the same bandwidth, H-WRR provides them with delay bounds that are close to those of weighted fair queueing.

Cell delay variation (CDV) has been considered as an important performance measure due to the stringent timing requirement for video and multimedia services. In this paper we address the problem of CDV performance guarantee in virtual path (VP)-based ATM multiplexing. We propose a rate-based and non-work-conserving scheduling algorithm, called interleaved round robin (IRR), for serving traffic streams among VPs into the outgoing link. Through our performance analysis, the proposed scheme is capable of providing upper and lower bounds on the inter-visit time (IVT) for each VP, where the difference between the upper bound and the lower bound is simply dependent upon the number of multiplexed VPs. The distribution of VP IVT scheduled by an IRR server can also be well approximated using a random incidence technique. In addition to the VP-level CDV performance, we further examine the virtual connection (VC)-level CDV incurred within a multi-stage network through simulation study. The simulation results show that the IRR server can provide traffic regulation and smoothness at each network node. Moreover, the CDV distribution of a tagged VC is insensitive to the source traffic characteristic, node location, and the hop count traversed in the network.

Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) networks are expected to support a diverse mix of traffic sources requiring different Quality Of Service (QOS) guarantees. This paper initially examines several existing scheduling disciplines which offer delay guarantees in ATM switches. Among them, the Earliest-Due-Date (EDD) discipline has been regarded as one of the most promising scheduling disciplines. The EDD discipline schedules the departure of a cell belonging to a call based on the delay priority assigned for that call during the call set-up. Supporting n delay-based service classes through the use of n respective urgency numbers D0 to Dn-1 (D0D1 Dn-1), EDD allows a class-i cell to precede any class-j (j>i) cell arriving not prior to (Dj-Di)-slot time. The main goal of the paper is to determine the urgency numbers (Dis), based on an in-depth queueing analysis, in an attempt to offer ninety-nine percentile delay guarantees for higher priority calls under various traffic loads. In the analysis, we derive system-time distributions for both high- and low-priority cells based on a discrete-time, single-server queueing model assuming renewal and non-renewal arrival processes. The validity of the analysis is justified via simulation. With the urgency numbers (Dis) determined, we further propose a feasible efficient VLSI implementation architecture for the EDD scheduling discipline, furnishing the realization of QOS guarantees in ATM switches.

A new rate-controlled queueing discipline, called virtual rate-based queueing (VRBQ), is proposed for packet-switching nodes in connection-oriented, high-speed, wide-area networks. The VRBQ discipline is based on the virtual rate which has a value between the average and peak transmission rates. By choosing appropriate virtual rates, various requirements can be met regarding the performance and quality of services in integrated-service networks. As the worst-case performance guarantee, we determine the upper bounds of queueing delay when VRBQ is combined with an admission control mechanism, i.e., Dynamic Time Windows or Leaky Bucket. Simulation results demonstrate the fairness policy of VRBQ in comparison with other queueing disciplines, and the performance of sources controlled under different virtual rates.

A new recursive method for obtaining the mean waiting time in a polling system with general service order and gated service discipline is proposed. The analytical approach used to obtain the mean waiting time is via an imbedded Markov chain and a new recursive method is used to obtain the moments of pseudocycle time which are parameters in the formula for the mean waiting time. This method is computationally tractable, so the analytical results can cover a wide range of applications. Simulations are also conducted to verify the validity of the analysis.