We propose an adaptive load balancing method for multiple paths that makes it possible to achieve high TCP performance on each path. In conventional load balancing methods, link utilization is the main parameter to be balanced among multiple paths that are established between an ingress and egress node pair. However, when we take into account TCP-level performance, balancing the traffic in terms of only link utilization may not always result in balanced TCP performance on each path. Our method utilizes flow statistics such as the number of active flows in each path, which is easy to measure, and can treat TCP performance. By adaptively equalizing the average bandwidth used per active flow in each path, which is calculated by dividing the input rate to the path by the mean number of active flows, our method achieves fair and high TCP performance on each path. Unlike other methods, intermediate nodes between an ingress-egress pair are not required to perform traffic controls or measurements besides normal packet forwarding. We describe a load balancing method for adaptively equalizing the average bandwidth used per active flow on each path and show its effectiveness under heterogeneous conditions through simulation analysis.

Ship handling for leaving and entering port always carries out for a captain, deck officers and quartermasters and sometimes include a pilot. For navigational watch keeping at sea except for a narrow channel and under restricted visibility etc., the deck officer and quartermaster do it. They achieve safe and efficient navigational watch keeping with their teamwork at a ship's bridge. The importance of teamwork has been recognized in the shipping world, and its training and education methods are also thought over. However, their evaluation is not clear, because they are depended on the experience of the trainers. Therefore, we need to make an evaluation method of teamwork for education and training of the ship handling. In this paper, we define that ship's bridge teamwork is shown by 1) a change of mental workload level and 2) a change of mental workload for time. We challenge to evaluate teammates' mental workload in the ship's bridge with R-R interval of subjects' heart rate variability, and we evaluate their mental workloads with the following three steps. 1) To confirm the evaluation of the mental workload of a ship's navigator with R-R interval. 2) To evaluate teamwork with R-R interval in case of an oral presentation at meetings as pre-experiments. 3) To evaluate the teammates' mental workload among ship's bridge team in case of a leaving port. Their results showed that the method using R-R interval was sufficient for the evaluation of teamwork effects.

In provisioning packet data service on wireless cellular networks, a scheme of altering connection status between mobile and base stations appeared intending to efficiently utilize resource during idle periods. In such a scheme, connection components are sequentially released as an idle period persists, while the transmitting station converts to an transmission activity mode as the station is loaded with packets. However, actual resume of transmission activity is postponed by connection retrieval time to restore lost connection components. In general, an idle period affects the following connection retrieval time, which in turn produces an impact on the forthcoming idle period. Such chain reaction also makes a significant influence on overall packet delay performance. In this paper, as a way of improving packet delay performance, we propose two schemes identified as conservative extension and load threshold schemes. In the conservative extension scheme, we intentionally extend connection retrieval times so that each connection retrieval time is guaranteed not to be lower than a certain value. On the other hand, according to the load threshold scheme, a retrieval of lost connection components is postponed until packets are accumulated at the transmitting station up to a prescribed threshold. An increase in the value and threshold incurs an additional stand-by before resuming transmission activity in both proposed schemes. In turn, such intentional stand-by may contribute to regulating the length of idle period and connection retrieval time, and subsequently improving packet delay performance. To inspect the impact of conservative extension and load threshold schemes on packet delay performance, we first investigate the properties of idle periods. Secondly, for Poisson packet arrivals, we present an analytical method to exactly calculate the moments of packet delay time (at steady state) in each scheme. From numerical examples, we confirm the existence of non-trivial optimal value and threshold minimizing average packet delay or packet delay variation and conclude that conservative extension and load threshold schemes are able to enhance packet delay performance in various environments.

Internet traffic engineering is much important for Internet Service Providers (ISPs) today, since it can be used to fully utilize already deployed network resources. For ISPs, the requirements for traffic engineering should be simple, easy to configure, cost-effective and efficient. Based on these considerations, we propose an algorithm called Web First Adaptive Traffic Engineering (WFATE). Since World Wide Web (WWW) services dominate most of the total Internet traffic and WWW flows are not long-lived, we only apply load balancing to WWW traffic in the algorithm. It can be shown that the number of coexistent WWW flows at an ingress node is almost certainly below a bound, and thus a forward-per-flow mechanism without keeping track of the state of each flow is feasible. This mechanism can balance traffic load at fine granularity and therefore get better performance. Through simulations and performance comparison, it is shown that WFATE is quite efficient, which can improve the network throughput averagely by 26% under the "dense source" traffic pattern and 9% under the "sparse source" traffic pattern.

A traffic engineering problem in a network consists of setting up paths between the edge nodes of the network to meet traffic demands while optimizing network performance. It is known that total traffic throughput in a network, or resource utilization, can be maximized if a traffic demand is split over multiple paths. However, the problem formulation and practical algorithms, which calculate the paths and the load-splitting ratios by taking bandwidth, the route constraints or policies into consideration, have not been much touched. In this paper, we formulate the constrained multipath-routing problems with the objective of minimizing the maximum of link utilization, while satisfying bandwidth, the maximum hop count, and the not-preferred node/link list in Linear Programming (LP). Optimal solutions of paths and load-splitting ratios found by an LP solver are shown to be superior to the conventional shortest path algorithm in terms of maximum link utilization, total traffic volume, and number of required paths. Then, we propose a heuristic algorithm with low computational complexity that finds near optimal paths and load-splitting ratios satisfying the given constraints. The proposed algorithm is applied to Multi-Protocol Label Switching (MPLS) that can permit explicit path setup, and it is tested in a fictitious backbone network. The experiment results show that the heuristic algorithm finds near optimal solutions.

Recent advances in measurement techniques for microwave active devices and circuits are reviewed in this paper. The R&D activities have been devoted aggressively how to characterize nonlinear performance of high power devices and circuits. They are pulsed I-V, a variety of load-pull measurements, probing, sampling, and sensing techniques, supported by the recent significant advances in DSP (Digital Signal Processing), RF components, semiconductor devices, etc. The recent advances in vector network analyzers are of our great interest. They are (a) multi-port vector network analyzers for characterizing mixers, differential devices, packaged components, electronic package characterization, and multi-layer transmission lines, and (b) EO (Electro-Optic) modulated vector network analyzers for characterizing electronic performance of EO devices with the aid of EO modulators and photonic probes. In addition, probing, sampling, and sensing techniques have made great progress to directly measure electromagnetic field, time-domain voltage waveform, and temperature in small spot areas. In this paper, some topics related to these measurement techniques are briefly reviewed. Then the existing and future issues for characterization and measurement techniques of microwave active devices and circuits are discussed.

In order to benefit from the advantages of soft handoff (SHO), it is important that the SHO parameters (the SHO thresholds; T_ADD and T_DROP are well assigned. T_ADD is the threshold used for triggering a pilot with high strength to be added to the Active Set (AS) list. The AS means the pilots associated with the forward traffic channels assigned to mobile station. In contrast, T_DROP is the threshold used for triggering a pilot with low strength to be dropped from the AS list. This paper analyzes the effects of varying SHO thresholds in a cellular code division multiple access (CDMA) system on the blocking probability based on traffic load and geometrical distances in hexagonal layout of base stations (BSs). In addition, the previously proposed traffic load equation is applied to the proposed SHO model for balancing the numbers of new and handoff calls on the forward link capacity in case of uniform traffic load. The results show that the blocking probability is more sensitive to T_DROP than to T_ADD variations.

This paper describes the design and implementation of a testbed for predicting master/slave (M/S) programs written using Message Passing Interface (MPI) programs. The testbed, named M/S Emulator (MSE), aims at assisting developers in evaluating the performance of M/S programs and dynamic load-balancing strategies on clusters of PCs. In order to realize this, MSE predicts the communication time by using a realistic parallel computational model, an extension of the LogGPS model. This extended model improves the prediction accuracy on a large number of processors, because it captures the master's bottleneck: the overhead required for retrieving arrival messages from the slaves. Current MSE also employs a best effort emulation method for predicting the calculation time. In our experiments, MSE demonstrated an accurate prediction on clusters, especially on a larger number of nodes. Therefore, we believe that our extended model enables us to analyze the scalability of the M/S program performance.

Streaming services and visual communication services delivered over the Internet have become popular in recent years. In the future, broadband services using MPEG2/4 will become the dominant type. These services will require transport protocols that provide high quality and high throughput from end to end of the system. We propose a new transfer method that allows the network load to be adaptively balanced according to the network's state. We built a prototype of an actual MPEG2 streaming system and used it to estimate the effectiveness of this method.

We have proposed two types of software download methods for software radio (SR) based intelligent transport systems (ITS): (1) broadcasting-type software download method and (2) communication-type software download method. In this paper, we study their feasibility of their employment in a newly developed prototype. We give tangible examples of method (1) using the vehicle information and communication system (VICS) and method (2) using the dedicated short range communication (DSRC) system. We describe the download formats and procedures for both methods and use the experimental prototype to evaluate the basic software download time and configuration time. Moreover we also propose architecture of SR-based multimode terminal that can reduce download time and utilize over-the-air software download services by VICS and DSRC links.

As a lot of programs and contents such as movie files are being delivered via the Internet, and copies are often stored in distributed servers in order to reduce the load on the original servers, to ease network congestion, and to decrease response time. To retrieve an object file, existing methods simply select one or more servers. Such methods divide a file into equal pieces whose size is determined a priori. This approach is not practical for networks that offer variable bandwidth. In order to more utilize variable bandwidth, we propose an adaptive downloading method. We evaluate it by experiments conducted on the Internet. The results show that the new method is effective and that it will become an important network control technology for assurance.

A Distributed Computing System (DCS) contributes in proper partitioning of the tasks into modules and allocating them to various nodes so as to enable parallel execution of their modules by individual different processing nodes of the system. The scheduling of various modules on particular processing nodes may be preceded by appropriate allocation of modules of the different tasks to various processing nodes and then only the appropriate execution characteristic can be obtained. A number of algorithms have been proposed for allocation of tasks in a DCS. Most of the solutions proposed had simplifying assumptions. The very first assumption has been: consideration of a single task with their corresponding modules only; second, no consideration of the status of processing nodes in terms of the previously allocated modules of various tasks and third, the capacity and capability of the processing nodes. This work proposes algorithms for a realistic situation wherein multiple tasks with their modules compete for execution on a DCS dynamically considering their architectural capability. In this work, we propose two algorithms based on the two well-known A* and GA for the task allocation models. The paper explains the algorithms elaborately by illustrated examples and presents a comparative performance study among our algorithms and the algorithms for task allocation proposed in the various literatures. The results demonstrate that our GA based task allocation algorithm achieves better performance compared with the other algorithms.

Unloaded Q of an image-type dielectric resonator is studied with the simulation and experiment. It is shown that a gap between the dielectric resonator and the shield case reduces both the dielectric loss and conductor loss. The gap moves the electric and magnetic field distributions in the different directions, so that the two losses are reduced. A half-cut image-type resonator with a dielectric spacer inserted into the gap is measured to verify the concept. The unloaded Q is improved by about two times from that without a gap. The proposed structure gives a new packaging method of a dielectric resonator.

This paper presents a new modulation scheme for Very-High Speed Digital Subscriber Lines (VDSL) modem, featuring a Multi-Code Multi-Carrier Code Division Multiple Access (MC2-CDMA) modulation. The system takes advantage from both the CDMA modulation and the Multi-Carrier transmission, and furthermore the channel throughput is increased adopting a multi-code approach. Starting from an overview of this novel scheme, encompassing the transmitter, channel and receiver description, a brief review of the equalization techniques is also considered and a proper bit-loading algorithm is derived to find out the achievable overall channel rate. The aim of this paper, besides introducing this novel scheme, is to demonstrate its suitability for a VDSL environment, where the achievable channel rate represents a real challenge. By means of a further optimisation, a general improvement of the system performance with respect to the standardized Discrete Multi Tone (DMT) modulation is also demonstrated.

In this letter, we present a new IPv6 multihoming scheme, which complements in both load sharing and delay aspects. The advantages of the proposed scheme are as follows: 1) it provides efficient load sharing algorithm. 2) Since it distributes concentrated tunneling overhead to many other border routers, it can solve a point of failure problem. 3) Finally, it can drastically reduce end-to-end delay by means of establishing alternative optimized path. The simulation results show the distinct performance of our approach.

Recently, layer-4 (L4) switches have been widely used as load balancing front-end routers for Web server clusters. The typical L4 switch attempts to balance load among the servers by estimating load using the load metrics measured in the front-end and/or the servers. However, insufficient load metrics, measurement overhead, and feedback delay often cause misestimate of server load. This may incur significant dynamic load imbalance among the servers particularly when the variation of requested content is high. In this paper, we propose a new content sniffer based load distribution strategy. By sniffing the requests being forwarded to the servers and by extracting load metrics from them, the L4 switch with our strategy more timely and accurately estimates server load without the help of back-end servers. Thus it can properly react to dynamic load imbalance among the servers under various workloads. Our experimental results demonstrate substantial performance improvements over other load balancing strategies used in the typical L4 switch.

A frequency-tuning method in the microwave region, which maintains a high unloaded Q-factor, was demonstrated using a double-sapphire-loaded cavity which operates on the Whispering Gallery mode, WGH9,1,0. Two adjacent nominally identical sapphire cylinders were positioned in a copper cavity and tuned by changing their relative coupling. A frequency tuning range of 85 MHz and a maximum unloaded Q-factor of 1.3 105 was experimentally measured at room temperature. This is only 13% less than the single resonator Q-factor, which is a small compromise to pay for the increased tuning capacity.

Load balancing among multiple mirror servers located at distributed positions in the network is a key technique for content delivery services. For bandwidth allocated services, we consider how to select a suitable server from several candidates containing the same content at the time of a request. We propose limiting the candidates in advance and selecting a server from the limited set of servers in a round-robin fashion. The server sets that minimize the variance of the link load are derived using a greedy method for a given network topology and service demand. Through numerical evaluation, we demonstrate that the proposed method is superior to previous methods.

Mirroring of network servers has been considered to be effective for load balancing. However, the cost of setting up new mirror servers is enormously high. In this paper, we propose a dynamic file allocation model with a simple mirroring function for handling significant changes of network traffic in the Internet. According to the load fluctuation, we can dynamically reallocate files using this model. We show that our model accomplishes satisfactory performance and reduces cost by adding a simple mirroring function to all existent servers instead of setting up mirror servers afresh.

This paper concerns recognizing 3-dimensional object using proposed multi-layer block model. In particular, we aim to achieve desirable recognition performance while restricting the computational load to a low level using 3-step feature extraction procedure. An input image is first precisely partitioned into hierarchical layers of blocks in the form of base blocks and overlapping blocks. The hierarchical blocks are merged into a matrix, with which abundant local feature information can be obtained. The local features extracted are then employed by the kernel based support vector machines in tournament for enhanced system recognition performance while keeping it to low dimensional feature space. The simulation results show that the proposed feature extraction method reduces the computational load by over 80% and preserves the stable recognition rate from varying illumination and noise conditions.