With the rise of component-based software development, its reliability has attracted much attention from both academic and industry communities. Component-based software development focuses on architecture design, and thus it is important for reliability analysis to emphasize software architecture. Existing approaches to architecture-based software reliability analysis don't model the usage profile explicitly, and they ignore the difference between the testing profile and the practical profile of components, which limits their applicability and accuracy. In response to these issues, a new reliability modeling and prediction approach is introduced. The approach considers reliability-related architecture factors by explicitly modeling the system usage profile, and transforms the testing profile into the practical usage profile of components by representing the profile with input sub-domains. Finally, the evaluation experiment shows the potential of the approach.

Peer-to-Peer (P2P) file distribution systems can efficiently disseminate massive contents, such as disk images of operating systems, from a server to many users in a piece-by-piece manner. In particular, the BitTorrent protocol optimizes each peer's download speed by applying the tit-for-tat (TFT) strategy, where each peer preferentially uploads piece(s) to peer(s) from which it can download missing pieces faster. To the best of our knowledge, however, the optimality of TFT-based P2P file distribution has not been studied sufficiently. In this paper, we aim to understand the optimal scheduling in TFT-based P2P file distribution. First, we develop a discrete-time model of TFT-based P2P file distribution and formulate its optimal scheduling as a two-step integer linear programming problem. The first step is to minimize the average file retrieval time among peers, and the second step is to improve fairness among peers. We analyze the optimal solution obtained by the existing solver and reveal the characteristics of the optimal scheduling. Specifically, we show that it is crucial to distribute pieces from the server indirectly to peers with large upload capacity via those with small upload capacity.

This paper proposes a consistency maintenance scheme for P2P file sharing systems. The basic idea of the proposed scheme is to construct a static tree for each shared file to efficiently propagate the update information to all replica peers. The link to the root of the trees is acquired by referring to a Chord ring which stores the mapping from the set of shared files to the set of tree roots. The performance of the scheme is evaluated by simulation. The simulation result indicates that: 1) it reduces the number of messages in the Li's scheme by 54%, 2) it reduces the propagation delay of the scheme by more than 10%, and 3) the increase of the delay due to peer churns is effectively bounded provided that the percentage of leaving peers is less than 40%.

This paper presents a framework for reducing the energy consumption of embedded real-time systems. We implemented the presented framework as both an optimization toolchain and an energy-aware real-time operating system. The framework consists of the integration of multiple techniques to optimize the energy consumption. The main idea behind our approach is to utilize trade-offs between the energy consumption and the performance of different processor configurations during task checkpoints, and to maintain memory allocation during task context switches. In our framework, a target application is statically analyzed at both intra-task and inter-task levels. Based on these analyzed results, runtime optimization is performed in response to the behavior of the application. A case study shows that our toolchain and real-time operating systems have achieved energy reduction while satisfying the real-time performance. The toolchain has also been successfully applied to a practical application.

The large amounts of freely available open source software over the Internet are fundamentally changing the traditional paradigms of software development. Efficient categorization of the massive projects for retrieving relevant software is of vital importance for Internet-based software development such as solution searching, best practices learning and so on. Many previous works have been conducted on software categorization by mining source code or byte code, but were verified on only relatively small collections of projects with coarse-grained categories or clusters. However, Internet-based software development requires finer-grained, more scalable and language-independent categorization approaches. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to hierarchically categorize software projects based on their online profiles. We design a SVM-based categorization framework and adopt a weighted combination strategy to aggregate different types of profile attributes from multiple repositories. Different basic classification algorithms and feature selection techniques are employed and compared. Extensive experiments are carried out on more than 21,000 projects across five repositories. The results show that our approach achieves significant improvements by using weighted combination. Compared to the previous work, our approach presents competitive results with more finer-grained and multi-layered category hierarchy with more than 120 categories. Unlike approaches that use source code or byte code, our approach is more effective for large-scale and language-independent software categorization. In addition, experiments suggest that hierarchical categorization combined with general keyword-based searching improves the retrieval efficiency and accuracy.

To study the molten bridge phenomenon of contacts at the initial breaking process, an experimental device of molten bridge between slowly opening contacts was developed. The system consists of the contact moving control module, the circuit load and the observation module. The molten bridge of copper contact under two load conditions 9,V/19,A and 9,V/7.3,A were studied. The voltage and current characteristics curves of Cu molten bridge were extracted and the resistance and the instantaneous power of the molten bridge were analyzed. The image of the Cu molten bridge diameter was captured by CCD under 9,V/19,A and the influences of the contact force and the separation speed on the molten bridge length and the crater diameter of the anode were studied. The root profile of the Cu contacts after separation was analyzed by digital microscope. Research results show that the Cu molten bridge length has the same changing trend as the diameter of the anode crater. They both decrease with the increment of the separation speed and the decrement of the contact force.

In this paper, we propose a new user-level file system to support block relocation by modifying the file allocation table without actual data copying. The key idea of the proposed system is to provide the block insertion and deletion function for file manipulation. This approach can be used very effectively for block-aligned file modification applications such as a compress utility and a TAR archival system. To show the usefulness of the proposed file system, we adapted the new functionality to TAR application by modifying TAR file to support an efficient sub-file management scheme. Experiment results show that the proposed system can significantly reduce the file I/O overhead and improve the I/O performance of a file system.

Software products are increasingly complex, so it is becoming more difficult to find and correct bugs in large programs. Software developers rely on bug reports to fix bugs; thus, bug-tracking tools have been introduced to allow developers to upload, manage, and comment on bug reports to guide corrective software maintenance. However, the very high frequency of duplicate bug reports means that the triagers who help software developers in eliminating bugs must allocate large amounts of time and effort to the identification and analysis of these bug reports. In addition, classifying bug reports can help triagers arrange bugs in categories for the fixers who have more experience for resolving historical bugs in the same category. Unfortunately, due to a large number of submitted bug reports every day, the manual classification for these bug reports increases the triagers' workload. To resolve these problems, in this study, we develop a novel technique for automatic duplicate detection and classification of bug reports, which reduces the time and effort consumed by triagers for bug fixing. Our novel technique uses a support vector machine to check whether a new bug report is a duplicate. The concept profile is also used to classify the bug reports into related categories in a taxonomic tree. Finally, we conduct experiments that demonstrate the feasibility of our proposed approach using bug reports extracted from the large-scale open source project Mozilla.

In this paper, we consider power allocation over multiple transmit antennas in a distributed transmit antenna system with delay diversity assuming that the power delay profile (PDP) is available for each transmit antenna. This paper demonstrates that the optimal power allocation for outage minimization greatly depends on the system's operating signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) range. With a low operating SNR, it is required to assign all power to the antenna closest to the receiver. On the other hand, when the operating SNR is sufficiently high, power must be allocated proportional to the number of the non-zero elements in the PDP for each antenna.

The numbers of files in file systems have increased dramatically in recent years. Office workers spend much time and effort searching for the documents required for their jobs. To reduce these costs, we propose a new method for recommending files and operations on them. Existing technologies for recommendation, such as collaborative filtering, suffer from two problems. First, they can only work with documents that have been accessed in the past, so that they cannot recommend when only newly generated documents are inputted. Second, they cannot easily handle sequences involving similar or differently ordered elements because of the strict matching used in the access sequences. To solve these problems, such minor variations should be ignored. In our proposed method, we introduce the concepts of abstract files as groups of similar files used for a similar purpose, abstract tasks as groups of similar tasks, and frequent abstract workflows grouped from similar workflows, which are sequences of abstract tasks. In experiments using real file-access logs, we confirmed that our proposed method could extract workflow patterns with longer sequences and higher support-count values, which are more suitable as recommendations. In addition, the F-measure for the recommendation results was improved significantly, from 0.301 to 0.598, compared with a method that did not use the concepts of abstract tasks and abstract workflows.

This paper presents an application of the constained interpolation profile basis set (CIP-BS) method to electromagnetic fields analyses. Electromagnetic fields can be expanded in terms of multi-dimensional CIP basis functions, and the Galerkin method can then be applied to obtain a system of linear equations. In the present study, we focus on a two-dimensional problem with TMz polarization. In order to examine the precision of the CIP-BS method, TE202 resonant mode in a rectangular cavity is analyzed. The numerical results show that CIP-BS method has better performance than the finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) method when the time step is small. Then an absorbing boundary condition based on the perfectly matched layer (PML) is formulated, and the absorption performance is demonstrated. Finally, the propagation in an inhomogeneous medium is computed by using the proposed method, and it is observed that in the CIP-BS method, smooth variation of material constants is effectively formulated without additional computational costs, and that accurate results are obtained in comparison with the FDTD method even if the permittivity is high.

The Log-structured File System (LFS) transforms random writes to a huge sequential one to provide superior write performance on storage devices. However, LFS inherently suffers from overhead incurred by cleaning segments. Specifically, when file system utilization is high and the system is busy, write performance of LFS degenerates significantly due to high cleaning cost. Also, in the newer flash memory based SSD storage devices, cleaning leads to reduced SSD lifetime as it incurs more writes. In this paper, we propose an enhancement to the original LFS to alleviate the performance degeneration due to cleaning when the system is busy. The new scheme, which we call Slack Space Recycling (SSR), allows LFS to delay on-demand cleaning during busy hours such that cleaning may be done when the load is much lighter. Specifically, it writes modified data directly to invalid areas (slack space) of used segments instead of cleaning on-demand, pushing back cleaning for later. SSR also has the added benefit of increasing the lifetime of the now popular SSD storage devices. We implement the new SSR-LFS file system in Linux and perform a large set of experiments. The results of these experiments show that the SSR scheme significantly improves performance of LFS for a wide range of storage utilization settings and that the lifetime of SSDs is extended considerably.

In this paper we report on an approach inspired by Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) to provide a fault tolerant and efficient means of transferring data in dynamic environments. We investigate the problem of distributing data between a client and server by using pheromone equations. Ants choose the best source of food by selecting the strongest pheromone trail leaving the nest. The pheromone decays over-time and needs to be continually reinforced to define the optimum route in a dynamic environment. This resembles the dynamic environment for the distribution of data between clients and servers. Our approach uses readily available network and server information to construct a pheromone that determines the best server from which to download data. We demonstrate that the approach is self-optimizing and capable of adapting to dynamic changes in the environment.

Linear complexity profile and correlation measure of order k are important pseudorandomness measures for sequences used in cryptography. We study both measures for a class of binary sequences called Legendre-Sidelnikov sequences. The proofs involve character sums.

This paper precisely characterizes secret sharing schemes based on arbitrary linear codes by using the relative dimension/length profile (RDLP) and the relative generalized Hamming weight (RGHW). We first describe the equivocation Δm of the secret vector =[s1,...,sl] given m shares in terms of the RDLP of linear codes. We also characterize two thresholds t1 and t2 in the secret sharing schemes by the RGHW of linear codes. One shows that any set of at most t1 shares leaks no information about , and the other shows that any set of at least t2 shares uniquely determines . It is clarified that both characterizations for t1 and t2 are better than Chen et al.'s ones derived by the regular minimum Hamming weight. Moreover, this paper characterizes the strong security in secret sharing schemes based on linear codes, by generalizing the definition of strongly-secure threshold ramp schemes. We define a secret sharing scheme achieving the α-strong security as the one such that the mutual information between any r elements of (s1,...,sl) and any α-r+1 shares is always zero. Then, it is clarified that secret sharing schemes based on linear codes can always achieve the α-strong security where the value α is precisely characterized by the RGHW.

Accurate estimation of Software Code Size is important for developing cost-efficient embedded systems. The Code Size affects the amount of system resources needed, like ROM and RAM memory, and processing capacity. In our previous work, we have estimated the Code Size based on CFP (COSMIC Function Points) within 15% accuracy, with the purpose of deciding how much ROM memory to fit into products with high cost pressure. Our manual CFP measurement process would require 2.5 man years to estimate the ROM size required in a typical car. In this paper, we want to investigate how the manual effort involved in estimation of Code Size can be minimized. We define a UML Profile capturing all information needed for estimation of Code Size, and develop a tool for automated estimation of Code Size based on CFP. A case study will show how UML models save manual effort in a realistic case.

In this paper, Source/Drain (S/D) engineering for high performance (HP) Vertical MOSFET (V-MOSFET) in 3Xnm generation and its beyond is investigated, by using gradual S/D profile while degradation of driving current (ION) due to the parasitic series resistance (Rpara) is minimized through two-dimensional device simulation taking into account for gate-induced-drain-leakage (GIDL). In general, it is significant to reduce spreading resistance in the case of conventional Planar MOSFET. Therefore, in this study, we focused and analyzed the abruptness of diffusion layer that is still importance parameter in V-MOSFET. First, for improving the basic device performance such as subthreshold swing (SS), ION, and Rpara, S/D engineering is investigated. The dependency of device performance on S/D abruptness (σS/D) for various Lightly Doped Drain Extension (LDD) abruptness (σLDD) is analyzed. In this study, Spacer Length (LSP) is defined as a function of σS/D. As σS/D becomes smaller and S/D becomes more abrupt, LSP becomes shorter. SS depends on the σS/D rather than the σLDD. ION has the peak value of 1750 µA/µm at σS/D = 2 nm/dec. and σLDD=3 nm/dec. when the silicon pillar diameter (D) is 30 nm and the gate length (Lg) is 60 nm. As σS/D becomes small, higher ION is obtained due to reduction of Rpara while SS is degraded. However, when σS/D becomes too small in the short channel devices (Lg = 60 nm and Lg = 45 nm), ION is degraded because the leakage current due to GIDL is increased and reaches IOFF limit of 100 nA/µm. In addition, as σLDD becomes larger, larger ION is obtained in the case of Lg = 100 nm and Lg = 60 nm because channel length becomes shorter. On the other hand, in the case of Lg = 45 nm, as σLDD becomes larger, ION is degraded because short channel effect (SCE) becomes significant. Next, the dependency of the basic device performance on D is investigated. By slimming D from 30 nm to 10 nm, while SS is improved and approaches the ideal value of 60 mV/Decade, ION is degraded due to increase of on-resistance (Ron). From these results, it is necessary to reduce Rpara while IOFF meets limit of 100 nA/µm for designing S/D of HP V-MOSFET. Especially for the V-MOSFET in the 1Xnm generation and its beyond, the influence of the Rpara and GIDL on ION becomes more significant, and therefore, the trade-off between σS/D and ION has a much greater impact on S/D engineering of V-MOSFET.

In deep-submicron era, wire delay is becoming a bottleneck while pursuing higher system clock speed. Several distributed register (DR) architectures are proposed to cope with this problem by keeping most wires local. In this article, we propose the distributed register-file microarchitecture with inter-island delay (DRFM-IID). Though DRFM-IID is also one of the DR-based architectures, it is considered more practical than the previously proposed DRFM, in terms of delay model. With such delay consideration, the synthesis task is inherently more complicated than the one without inter-island delay concern since uncertain interconnect latency is very likely to seriously impact on the whole system performance. Therefore we also develop a performance-driven architectural synthesis framework targeting DRFM-IID. Several factors for evaluating the quality of results, such as number of inter-island transfers, timing-criticality of transfer, and resource utilization balancing, are adopted as the guidance while performing architectural synthesis for better optimization outcomes. The experimental results show that the latency and the number of inter-cluster transfers can be reduced by 26.9% and 37.5% on average; and the latter is commonly regarded as an indicator for power consumption of on-chip communication.

This paper describes a metasurface designed utilizing either a Frequency Selective Surface (FSS) that has band-pass characteristics or one with band-rejection filtering characteristics in order to clarify the relationship between the filtering characteristics of the FSS and the Perfect Magnetic Conductor (PMC) characteristics of the metasurface. The effects of the filtering characteristics of the FSS on the PMC characteristics of the metasurface are described. Calculation results confirm that a low profile metasurface can be achieved using these FSSs. In addition, the effects of the size of the metasurface on the PMC characteristics of the surface are shown.

A total-field/scattered-field (TF/SF) boundary for the constrained interpolation profile (CIP) method is proposed for multi-dimensional electromagnetic problems. Incident fields are added to or subtracted from update equations in order to satisfy advection equations into which Maxwell's equations are reduced by means of the directional splitting. Modified incident fields are introduced to take into account electromagnetic fields after advection. The developed TF/SF boundary is examined numerically, and the results show that it operates with good performance. Finally, we apply the proposed TF/SF boundary to a scattering problem, and it can be solved successfully.