Computers

  2010 SEP 9 - (VerticalNews.com) -- "Distributed estimation of global parameters in intermittently connected mobile networks is a challenging research issue," scientists in Trento, Italy report.

  "In this paper, we introduce and evaluate different approaches, based on gossiping techniques as well as population protocols. The performance of the mechanisms proposed is shown to depend heavily on the specific features of the underlying mobility patterns," wrote A. Guerrieri and colleagues ...read more

  2010 SEP 9 - (VerticalNews.com) -- According to recent research published in the journal Computer Communications, "The publish/subscribe paradigm represents a large class of applications in sensor networks as sensors are designed mainly to detect and notify upon events of interests. Thus, it is important to design a publish/subscribe mechanism to enable such applications."

  "Many existing solutions require that the sensor node locations be known, which is not possible for many sensor networks. Among those that do not require so, the common approach currently is to use an expensive gossip procedure to disseminate subscription queries and published events. We propose a solution that does not require location information yet aimed at better efficiency than the gossip-based approach," wrote D.A. Tran and colleagues, University of Massachusetts ...read more

  2010 SEP 9 - (VerticalNews.com) -- According to recent research from Scotland, "This article presents a statistical approach to the scheduling of divisible workloads. Structured as a task farm with different scheduling modes including adaptive single and multi-round scheduling, this novel divisible load theory approach comprises two phases, calibration and execution, which dynamically adapt the installment size and number."

  "It introduces the concept of a generic installment factor based on the statistical dispersion of the calibration times of the participating nodes, which allows automatic determination of the number and size of the workload installments. Initially, the calibration ranks processors according to their fitness and determines an installment factor based on how different their execution times are. Subsequently, the execution iteratively distributes the workload according to the processor fitness, which is continuously re-assessed throughout the program execution," wrote H. Gonzalezvelez and colleagues, Robert Gordon University ...read more