004 Datenverarbeitung; Informatik
Refine
Has Fulltext
- yes (203)
Year of publication
Document Type
- Journal article (78)
- Doctoral Thesis (75)
- Working Paper (37)
- Conference Proceeding (8)
- Master Thesis (3)
- Report (2)
Language
- English (183)
- German (19)
- Multiple languages (1)
Keywords
- Datennetz (14)
- Leistungsbewertung (13)
- virtual reality (12)
- Robotik (8)
- Mobiler Roboter (7)
- Autonomer Roboter (6)
- Komplexitätstheorie (5)
- Optimierung (5)
- P4 (5)
- Simulation (5)
Institute
- Institut für Informatik (203) (remove)
Schriftenreihe
Sonstige beteiligte Institutionen
In future telecommunication systems, we observe an increasing diversity of access networks. The separation of transport services and applications or services leads to multi-network services, i.e., a future service has to work transparently to the underlying network infrastructure. Multi-network services with edge-based intelligence, like P2P file sharing or the Skype VoIP service, impose new traffic control paradigms on the future Internet. Such services adapt the amount of consumed bandwidth to reach different goals. A selfish behavior tries to keep the QoE of a single user above a certain level. Skype, for instance, repeats voice samples depending on the perceived end-to-end loss. From the viewpoint of a single user, the replication of voice data overcomes the degradation caused by packet loss and enables to maintain a certain QoE. The cost for this achievement is a higher amount of consumed bandwidth. However, if the packet loss is caused by congestion in the network, this additionally required bandwidth even worsens the network situation. Altruistic behavior, on the other side, would reduce the bandwidth consumption in such a way that the pressure on the network is released and thus the overall network performance is improved. In this monograph, we analyzed the impact of the overlay, P2P, and QoE paradigms in future Internet applications and the interactions from the observing user behavior. The shift of intelligence toward the edge is accompanied by a change in the emerging user behavior and traffic profile, as well as a change from multi-service networks to multi-networks services. In addition, edge-based intelligence may lead to a higher dynamics in the network topology, since the applications are often controlled by an overlay network, which can rapidly change in size and structure as new nodes can leave or join the overlay network in an entirely distributed manner. As a result, we found that the performance evaluation of such services provides new challenges, since novel key performance factors have to be first identified, like pollution of P2P systems, and appropriate models of the emerging user behavior are required, e.g. taking into account user impatience. As common denominator of the presented studies in this work, we focus on a user-centric view when evaluating the performance of future Internet applications. For a subscriber of a certain application or service, the perceived quality expressed as QoE will be the major criterion of the user's satisfaction with the network and service providers. We selected three different case studies and characterized the application's performance from the end user's point of view. Those are (1) cooperation in mobile P2P file sharing networks, (2) modeling of online TV recording services, and (3) QoE of edge-based VoIP applications. The user-centric approach facilitates the development of new mechanisms to overcome problems arising from the changing user behavior. An example is the proposed CycPriM cooperation strategy, which copes with selfish user behavior in mobile P2P file sharing system. An adequate mechanism has also been shown to be efficient in a heterogeneous B3G network with mobile users conducting vertical handovers between different wireless access technologies. The consideration of the user behavior and the user perceived quality guides to an appropriate modeling of future Internet applications. In the case of the online TV recording service, this enables the comparison between different technical realizations of the system, e.g. using server clusters or P2P technology, to properly dimension the installed network elements and to assess the costs for service providers. Technologies like P2P help to overcome phenomena like flash crowds and improve scalability compared to server clusters, which may get overloaded in such situations. Nevertheless, P2P technology invokes additional challenges and different user behavior to that seen in traditional client/server systems. Beside the willingness to share files and the churn of users, peers may be malicious and offer fake contents to disturb the data dissemination. Finally, the understanding and the quantification of QoE with respect to QoS degradations permits designing sophisticated edge-based applications. To this end, we identified and formulated the IQX hypothesis as an exponential interdependency between QoE and QoS parameters, which we validated for different examples. The appropriate modeling of the emerging user behavior taking into account the user's perceived quality and its interactions with the overlay and P2P paradigm will finally help to design future Internet applications.
3D point clouds are a de facto standard for 3D documentation and modelling. The advances in laser scanning technology broadens the usability and access to 3D measurement systems. 3D point clouds are used in many disciplines such as robotics, 3D modelling, archeology and surveying. Scanners are able to acquire up to a million of points per second to represent the environment with a dense point cloud. This represents the captured environment with a very high degree of detail. The combination of laser scanning technology with photography adds color information to the point clouds. Thus the environment is represented more realistically. Full 3D models of environments, without any occlusion, require multiple scans. Merging point clouds is a challenging process. This thesis presents methods for point cloud registration based on the panorama images generated from the scans. Image representation of point clouds introduces 2D image processing methods to 3D point clouds. Several projection methods for the generation of panorama maps of point clouds are presented in this thesis. Additionally, methods for point cloud reduction and compression based on the panorama maps are proposed. Due to the large amounts of data generated from the 3D measurement systems these methods are necessary to improve the point cloud processing, transmission and archiving. This thesis introduces point cloud processing methods as a novel framework for the digitisation of archeological excavations. The framework replaces the conventional documentation methods for excavation sites. It employs point clouds for the generation of the digital documentation of an excavation with the help of an archeologist on-site. The 3D point cloud is used not only for data representation but also for analysis and knowledge generation. Finally, this thesis presents an autonomous indoor mobile mapping system. The mapping system focuses on the sensor placement planning method. Capturing a complete environment requires several scans. The sensor placement planning method solves for the minimum required scans to digitise large environments. Combining this method with a navigation system on a mobile robot platform enables it to acquire data fully autonomously. This thesis introduces a novel hole detection method for point clouds to detect obscured parts of a captured environment. The sensor placement planning method selects the next scan position with the most coverage of the obscured environment. This reduces the required number of scans. The navigation system on the robot platform consist of path planning, path following and obstacle avoidance. This guarantees the safe navigation of the mobile robot platform between the scan positions. The sensor placement planning method is designed as a stand alone process that could be used with a mobile robot platform for autonomous mapping of an environment or as an assistant tool for the surveyor on scanning projects.
Scalability is often mentioned in literature, but a stringent definition is missing. In particular, there is no general scalability assessment which clearly indicates whether a system scales or not or whether a system scales better than another. The key contribution of this article is the definition of a scalability index (SI) which quantifies if a system scales in comparison to another system, a hypothetical system, e.g., linear system, or the theoretically optimal system. The suggested SI generalizes different metrics from literature, which are specialized cases of our SI. The primary target of our scalability framework is, however, benchmarking of two systems, which does not require any reference system. The SI is demonstrated and evaluated for different use cases, that are (1) the performance of an IoT load balancer depending on the system load, (2) the availability of a communication system depending on the size and structure of the network, (3) scalability comparison of different location selection mechanisms in fog computing with respect to delays and energy consumption; (4) comparison of time-sensitive networking (TSN) mechanisms in terms of efficiency and utilization. Finally, we discuss how to use and how not to use the SI and give recommendations and guidelines in practice. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work which provides a general SI for the comparison and benchmarking of systems, which is the primary target of our scalability analysis.
This thesis deals with the management and analysis of source code, which is represented in XML. Using the elementary methods of the XML repository, the XML source code representation is accessed, changed, updated, and saved. We reason about the source code, refactor source code and we visualize dependency graphs for call analysis. The visualized dependencies between files, modules, or packages are used to structure the source code in order to get a system, which is easily to comprehend, to modify and to complete. Sophisticated methods have been developed to slice the source code in order to obtain a working package of a large system, containing only a specific functionality. The basic methods, on which the visualizations and analyses are built on can be changed like changing a plug-in. The visualization methods can be reused in order to handle arbitrary source code representations, e.g., JAML, PHPML, PROLOGML. Dependencies of other context can be visualized, too, e.g., ER diagrams, or website references. The tool SCAV supports source code visualization and analyzing methods.
Routing is one of the most important issues in any communication network. It defines on which path packets are transmitted from the source of a connection to the destination. It allows to control the distribution of flows between different locations in the network and thereby is a means to influence the load distribution or to reach certain constraints imposed by particular applications. As failures in communication networks appear regularly and cannot be completely avoided, routing is required to be resilient against such outages, i.e., routing still has to be able to forward packets on backup paths even if primary paths are not working any more.
Throughout the years, various routing technologies have been introduced that are very different in their control structure, in their way of working, and in their ability to handle certain failure cases. Each of the different routing approaches opens up their own specific questions regarding configuration, optimization, and inclusion of resilience issues. This monograph investigates, with the example of three particular routing technologies, some concrete issues regarding the analysis and optimization of resilience. It thereby contributes to a better general, technology-independent understanding of these approaches and of their diverse potential for the use in future network architectures.
The first considered routing type, is decentralized intra-domain routing based on administrative IP link costs and the shortest path principle. Typical examples are common today's intra-domain routing protocols OSPF and IS-IS. This type of routing includes automatic restoration abilities in case of failures what makes it in general very robust even in the case of severe network outages including several failed components. Furthermore, special IP-Fast Reroute mechanisms allow for a faster reaction on outages. For routing based on link costs, traffic engineering, e.g. the optimization of the maximum relative link load in the network, can be done indirectly by changing the administrative link costs to adequate values.
The second considered routing type, MPLS-based routing, is based on the a priori configuration of primary and backup paths, so-called Label Switched Paths. The routing layout of MPLS paths offers more freedom compared to IP-based routing as it is not restricted by any shortest path constraints but any paths can be setup. However, this in general involves a higher configuration effort.
Finally, in the third considered routing type, typically centralized routing using a Software Defined Networking (SDN) architecture, simple switches only forward packets according to routing decisions made by centralized controller units. SDN-based routing layouts offer the same freedom as for explicit paths configured using MPLS. In case of a failure, new rules can be setup by the controllers to continue the routing in the reduced topology. However, new resilience issues arise caused by the centralized architecture. If controllers are not reachable anymore, the forwarding rules in the single nodes cannot be adapted anymore. This might render a rerouting in case of connection problems in severe failure scenarios infeasible.
Crowdsensing offers a cost-effective way to collect large amounts of environmental sensor data; however, the spatial distribution of crowdsensing sensors can hardly be influenced, as the participants carry the sensors, and, additionally, the quality of the crowdsensed data can vary significantly. Hybrid systems that use mobile users in conjunction with fixed sensors might help to overcome these limitations, as such systems allow assessing the quality of the submitted crowdsensed data and provide sensor values where no crowdsensing data are typically available. In this work, we first used a simulation study to analyze a simple crowdsensing system concerning the detection performance of spatial events to highlight the potential and limitations of a pure crowdsourcing system. The results indicate that even if only a small share of inhabitants participate in crowdsensing, events that have locations correlated with the population density can be easily and quickly detected using such a system. On the contrary, events with uniformly randomly distributed locations are much harder to detect using a simple crowdsensing-based approach. A second evaluation shows that hybrid systems improve the detection probability and time. Finally, we illustrate how to compute the minimum number of fixed sensors for the given detection time thresholds in our exemplary scenario.
This work focuses on coordination methods and the control of motion in groups of nonholonomic wheeled mobile robots, in particular of the car-like type. These kind of vehicles are particularly restricted in their mobility. In the main part of this work the two problems of formation motion coordination and of rendezvous in distributed multi-vehicle systems are considered. We introduce several enhancements to an existing motion planning approach for formations of nonholonomic mobile robots. Compared to the original method, the extended approach is able to handle time-varying reference speeds as well as adjustments of the formation's shape during reference trajectory segments with continuously differentiable curvature. Additionally, undesired discontinuities in the speed and steering profiles of the vehicles are avoided. Further, the scenario of snow shoveling on an airfield by utilizing multiple formations of autonomous snowplows is discussed. We propose solutions to the subproblems of motion planning for the formations and tracking control for the individual vehicles. While all situations that might occur have been tested in a simulation environment, we also verified the developed tracking controller in real robot hardware experiments. The task of the rendezvous problem in groups of car-like robots is to drive all vehicles to a common position by means of decentralized control laws. Typically there exists no direct interaction link between all of the vehicles. In this work we present decentralized rendezvous control laws for vehicles with free and with bounded steering. The convergence properties of the approaches are analyzed by utilizing Lyapunov based techniques. Furthermore, they are evaluated within various simulation experiments, while the bounded steering case is also verified within laboratory hardware experiments. Finally we introduce a modification to the bounded steering system that increases the convergence speed at the expense of a higher traveled distance of the vehicles.
Cooperative, connected and automated mobility (CCAM) systems depend on a reliable communication to provide their service and more crucially to ensure the safety of users. One way to ensure the reliability of a data transmission is to use multiple transmission technologies in combination with redundant flows. In this paper, we describe a system requiring multipath communication in the context of CCAM. To this end, we introduce a data plane-based scheduler that uses replication and integration modules to provide redundant and transparent multipath communication. We provide an analytical model for the full replication module of the system and give an overview of how and where the data-plane scheduler components can be realized.
Cooperative, connected and automated mobility (CCAM) systems depend on a reliable communication to provide their service and more crucially to ensure the safety of users. One way to ensure the reliability of a data transmission is to use multiple transmission technologies in combination with redundant flows. In this paper, we describe a system requiring multipath communication in the context of CCAM. To this end, we introduce a data plane-based scheduler that uses replication and integration modules to provide redundant and transparent multipath communication. We provide an analytical model for the full replication module of the system and give an overview of how and where the data-plane scheduler components can be realized.
Radiation therapy today, on account of improvements in treatment procedures over the last 60 years, allows precise treatment of static tumors inside the human body. However, irradiation of moving tumors is still a challenging task as moving tumors often leave the treatment beam and the radiation dose delivered to the tumor reduces simultaneously increasing that on healthy tissue. This research work aims to push the frontiers of radiation therapy in order to enable precise treatment of moving tumors with focus on research and development of a unique real-time system enabling active motion compensation through robotic means to compensate tumor motion. During treatment, patients lie on a treatment couch which is normally used for static position corrections of patient set-up errors prior to radiation treatment. The treatment couch used, called HexaPOD, is a parallel manipulator with six degrees of freedom which can precisely position heavy loads inside a small region. Despite the HexaPOD not initially built with dynamics in mind, it is used in this work for sustained motion compensation by moving patients such that tumors stay precisely located at the center of the treatment beam during the complete course of treatment. In order to realize real-time tumor motion compensation by means of the HexaPOD, several challanges need to be addressed. Real-time aspects are covered by the adoption of a hard real-time operation system in combination with measurement and estimation of latencies of all physical quantities in the compensation system such as tumor or breathing position measurements. Accurate timing information is respected consistently in the whole system and all software-induced latencies are adaptively compensated for. This requires knowledge of future tumor positions from predictors. Several predictors for breathing and tumor motion predictions are proposed and evaluated in terms of a variety of different performance metrics. Extensions to prediction algorithms are introduced fusing both breathing and tumor position information to allow for predictions without the need of an explicit correlation model. Predictions determine the future motion path of the HexaPOD in order to compensate for tumor motion. Several control schemes are developed to enable reference tracking for the HexaPOD. Based on linear and non-linear dynamic modelling of the HexaPOD with system identification methods, a first controller is derived in the form of a model predictive controller. A second controller is proposed based on an assumption of the working principle of the HexaPOD's internal controller. Finally, a third controller is derived as combination of the first and second one. For each of these controllers, comparative results with real hardware experiments and humans in the loop as well as choices of free parameters are presented and discussed. Apart from precise tracking, emphasis is placed on patient comfort which is of crucial importance for acceptance of the system. It is demonstrated that smooth trajectories can be realized by the controllers to guarantee that patients feel comfortable while their tumor motion is compensated at sub-millimeter accuracies. Overall errors of the system are analyzed by relating them to tracking and prediction errors. By exploiting the properties of different predictors, it is shown that the startup time until tracking is reached can be reduced to only a few seconds, even in the case of an initially at-rest HexaPOD and with no initial knowledge of tumor motion. This makes the system especially suitable for the relatively short-fractionated treatment sessions for lung tumors. The tumor motion compensation system has been developed solely based on standard clinical hardware, found in most treatment rooms. With a simple and flexible design, existing treatment can be updated in a cost-efficient way to introduce motion compensation capabilities. Simultaneously, the system does not impose any constraints on state-of-the-art treatment types such as intensity modulated radiotherapy or volumetric modulated arc therapy. Supporting different compensation modes, the system can be applied to any moving tumor whether its motion is predictable (lung tumors) or unpredictable (prostate tumors). By integration of adequate tumor position determination methods, the system can be easily extended to other tumors as well.
Verteilte dynamische Systeme unter lokalen und globalen Gesichtspunkten zu optimieren ist eine schwierige Aufgabe. Zwar sind grundsätzliche Auswirkungen einzelner Maßnahmen häufig bekannt, durch widerstrebende Ziele, Wechselwirkungen zwischen Prozessen und Nebenwirkungen von Maßnahmen ist ein analytisches Vorgehen bei der Optimierung nicht möglich. Besonders schwierig wird es, wenn lokale Einheiten einerseits ihre Ziele und Autonomie behalten sollen, aber durch zentrale Vorgaben bzw. Anreize so gesteuert werden sollen, dass ein übergeordnetes Ziel erreicht wird. Ein praktisches Beispiel dieses allgemeinen Optimierungsproblems findet sich im Gesundheitswesen. Das Management von modernen Kliniken ist stets mit dem Problem konfrontiert, die Qualität der Pflege zu gewährleisten und gleichzeitig kosteneffizient zu arbeiten. Hier gilt es unter gegeben Rahmenbedingungen und bei Respektierung der Autonomie der Funktionseinheiten, Optimierungsmaßnahmen zu finden und durchzuführen. Vorhandene Werkzeuge zur Simulation und Modellierung bieten für diese Aufgabe keine ausreichend guten Vorgehensmodelle und Modellierungsmechanismen. Die agentenbasierte Simulation ermöglicht die Abbildung solcher Systeme und die Durchführung von Simulationsexperimenten zur Bewertung einzelner Maßnahmen. Es werden Lösungswege und Werkzeuge vorgestellt und evaluiert, die den Benutzer bei der Formalisierung des Wissens und der Modellierung solch komplexer Szenarien unterstützen und ein systematisches Vorgehen zur Optimierung ermöglichen.
CLIP knows image aesthetics
(2022)
Most Image Aesthetic Assessment (IAA) methods use a pretrained ImageNet classification model as a base to fine-tune. We hypothesize that content classification is not an optimal pretraining task for IAA, since the task discourages the extraction of features that are useful for IAA, e.g., composition, lighting, or style. On the other hand, we argue that the Contrastive Language-Image Pretraining (CLIP) model is a better base for IAA models, since it has been trained using natural language supervision. Due to the rich nature of language, CLIP needs to learn a broad range of image features that correlate with sentences describing the image content, composition, environments, and even subjective feelings about the image. While it has been shown that CLIP extracts features useful for content classification tasks, its suitability for tasks that require the extraction of style-based features like IAA has not yet been shown. We test our hypothesis by conducting a three-step study, investigating the usefulness of features extracted by CLIP compared to features obtained from the last layer of a comparable ImageNet classification model. In each step, we get more computationally expensive. First, we engineer natural language prompts that let CLIP assess an image's aesthetic without adjusting any weights in the model. To overcome the challenge that CLIP's prompting only is applicable to classification tasks, we propose a simple but effective strategy to convert multiple prompts to a continuous scalar as required when predicting an image's mean aesthetic score. Second, we train a linear regression on the AVA dataset using image features obtained by CLIP's image encoder. The resulting model outperforms a linear regression trained on features from an ImageNet classification model. It also shows competitive performance with fully fine-tuned networks based on ImageNet, while only training a single layer. Finally, by fine-tuning CLIP's image encoder on the AVA dataset, we show that CLIP only needs a fraction of training epochs to converge, while also performing better than a fine-tuned ImageNet model. Overall, our experiments suggest that CLIP is better suited as a base model for IAA methods than ImageNet pretrained networks.
While developing modern applications, it is necessary to ensure an efficient and performant communication between different applications. In current environments, a middleware software is used, which supports the publish/subscribe communication pattern. Using this communication pattern, a publisher sends information encapsulated in messages to the middleware. A subscriber registers its interests at the middleware. The monograph describes three different steps to determine the performance of such a system. In a first step, the message throughput performance of a publish/subscribe in different scenarios is measured using a Java Message Service (JMS) based implementation. In the second step the maximum achievable message throughput is described by adapted models depending on the filter complexity and the replication grade. Using the model, the performance characteristics of a specific system in a given scenario can be determined. These numbers are used for the queuing model described in the third part of the thesis, which supports the dimensioning of a system in realistic scenarios. Additionally, we introduce a method to approximate an M/G/1 system numerically in an efficient way, which can be used for real time analysis to predict the expected performance in a certain scenario. Finally, the analytical model is used to investigate different possibilities to ensure the scalability of the maximum achievable message throughput of the overall system.
This study provides a systematic literature review of research (2001–2020) in the field of teaching and learning a foreign language and intercultural learning using immersive technologies. Based on 2507 sources, 54 articles were selected according to a predefined selection criteria. The review is aimed at providing information about which immersive interventions are being used for foreign language learning and teaching and where potential research gaps exist. The papers were analyzed and coded according to the following categories: (1) investigation form and education level, (2) degree of immersion, and technology used, (3) predictors, and (4) criterions. The review identified key research findings relating the use of immersive technologies for learning and teaching a foreign language and intercultural learning at cognitive, affective, and conative levels. The findings revealed research gaps in the area of teachers as a target group, and virtual reality (VR) as a fully immersive intervention form. Furthermore, the studies reviewed rarely examined behavior, and implicit measurements related to inter- and trans-cultural learning and teaching. Inter- and transcultural learning and teaching especially is an underrepresented investigation subject. Finally, concrete suggestions for future research are given. The systematic review contributes to the challenge of interdisciplinary cooperation between pedagogy, foreign language didactics, and Human-Computer Interaction to achieve innovative teaching-learning formats and a successful digital transformation.
Visual stimuli are frequently used to improve memory, language learning or perception, and understanding of metacognitive processes. However, in virtual reality (VR), there are few systematically and empirically derived databases. This paper proposes the first collection of virtual objects based on empirical evaluation for inter-and transcultural encounters between English- and German-speaking learners. We used explicit and implicit measurement methods to identify cultural associations and the degree of stereotypical perception for each virtual stimuli (n = 293) through two online studies, including native German and English-speaking participants. The analysis resulted in a final well-describable database of 128 objects (called InteractionSuitcase). In future applications, the objects can be used as a great interaction or conversation asset and behavioral measurement tool in social VR applications, especially in the field of foreign language education. For example, encounters can use the objects to describe their culture, or teachers can intuitively assess stereotyped attitudes of the encounters.
Wireless communication is nothing new. The first data transmissions based on electromagnetic waves have been successfully performed at the end of the 19th century. However, it took almost another century until the technology was ripe for mass market. The first mobile communication systems based on the transmission of digital data were introduced in the late 1980s. Within just a couple of years they have caused a revolution in the way people communicate. The number of cellular phones started to outnumber the fixed telephone lines in many countries and is still rising. New technologies in 3G systems, such as UMTS, allow higher data rates and support various kinds of multimedia services. Nevertheless, the end of the road in wireless communication is far from being reached. In the near future, the Internet and cellular phone systems are expected to be integrated to a new form of wireless system. Bandwidth requirements for a rich set of wireless services, e.g.\ video telephony, video streaming, online gaming, will be easily met. The transmission of voice data will just be another IP based service. On the other hand, building such a system is by far not an easy task. The problems in the development of the UMTS system showed the high complexity of wireless systems with support for bandwidth-hungry, IP-based services. But the technological challenges are just one difficulty. Telecommunication systems are planned on a world-wide basis, such that standard bodies, governments, institutions, hardware vendors, and service providers have to find agreements and compromises on a number of different topics. In this work, we provide the reader with a discussion of many of the topics involved in the planning of a Wireless LAN system that is capable of being integrated into the 4th generation mobile networks (4G) that is being discussed nowadays. Therefore, it has to be able to cope with interactive voice and video traffic while still offering high data rates for best effort traffic. Let us assume a scenario where a huge office complex is completely covered with Wireless LAN access points. Different antenna systems are applied in order to reduce the number of access points that are needed on the one hand, while optimizing the coverage on the other. No additional infrastructure is implemented. Our goal is to evaluate whether the Wireless LAN technology is capable of dealing with the various demands of such a scenario. First, each single access point has to be capable of supporting best-effort and Quality of Service (QoS) demanding applications simultaneously. The IT infrastructure in our scenario consists solely of Wireless LAN, such that it has to allow users surfing the Web, while others are involved in voice calls or video conferences. Then, there is the problem of overlapping cells. Users attached to one access point produce interference for others. However, the QoS support has to be maintained, which is not an easy task. Finally, there are nomadic users, which roam from one Wireless LAN cell to another even during a voice call. There are mechanisms in the standard that allow for mobility, but their capabilities for QoS support are yet to be studied. This shows the large number of unresolved issues when it comes to Wireless LAN in the context of 4G networks. In this work we want to tackle some of the problems.
Web caches often use a Time-to-live (TTL) limit to validate data consistency with web servers. We study the impact of TTL constraints on the hit ratio of basic strategies in caches of fixed size. We derive analytical results and confirm their accuracy in comparison to simulations. We propose a score-based caching method with awareness of the current TTL per data for improving the hit ratio close to the upper bound.
At the center of the Internet’s protocol stack stands the Internet Protocol (IP) as a common denominator that enables all communication. To make routing efficient, resilient, and scalable, several aspects must be considered. Care must be taken that traffic is well balanced to make efficient use of the existing network resources, both in failure free operation and in failure scenarios.
Finding the optimal routing in a network is an NP-complete problem. Therefore, routing optimization is usually performed using heuristics. This dissertation shows that a routing optimized with one objective function is often not good when looking at other objective functions. It can even be worse than unoptimized routing with respect to that objective function. After looking at failure-free routing and traffic distribution in different failure scenarios, the analysis is extended to include the loop-free alternate (LFA) IP fast reroute mechanism. Different application scenarios of LFAs are examined and a special focus is set on the fact that LFAs usually cannot protect all traffic in a network even against single link failures. Thus, the routing optimization for LFAs is targeted on both link utilization and failure coverage. Finally, the pre-congestion notification mechanism PCN for network admission control and overload protection is analyzed and optimized. Different design options for implementing the protocol are compared, before algorithms are developed for the calculation and optimization of protocol parameters and PCN-based routing.
The second part of the thesis tackles a routing problem that can only be resolved on a global scale. The scalability of the Internet is at risk since a major and intensifying growth of the interdomain routing tables has been observed. Several protocols and architectures are analyzed that can be used to make interdomain routing more scalable. The most promising approach is the locator/identifier (Loc/ID) split architecture which separates routing from host identification. This way, changes in connectivity, mobility of end hosts, or traffic-engineering activities are hidden from the routing in the core of the Internet and the routing tables can be kept much smaller. All of the currently proposed Loc/ID split approaches have their downsides. In particular, the fact that most architectures use the ID for routing outside the Internet’s core is a poor design, which inhibits many of the possible features of a new routing architecture. To better understand the problems and to provide a solution for a scalable routing design that implements a true Loc/ID split, the new GLI-Split protocol is developed in this thesis, which provides separation of global and local routing and uses an ID that is independent from any routing decisions.
Besides GLI-Split, several other new routing architectures implementing Loc/ID split have been proposed for the Internet. Most of them assume that a mapping system is queried for EID-to-RLOC mappings by an intermediate node at the border of an edge network. When the mapping system is queried by an intermediate node, packets are already on their way towards their destination, and therefore, the mapping system must be fast, scalable, secure, resilient, and should be able to relay packets without locators to nodes that can forward them to the correct destination. The dissertation develops a classification for all proposed mapping system architectures and shows their similarities and differences. Finally, the fast two-level mapping system FIRMS is developed. It includes security and resilience features as well as a relay service for initial packets of a flow when intermediate nodes encounter a cache miss for the EID-to-RLOC mapping.
Measurements of physiological parameters provide an objective, often non-intrusive, and (at least semi-)automatic evaluation and utilization of user behavior. In addition, specific hardware devices of Virtual Reality (VR) often ship with built-in sensors, i.e. eye-tracking and movements sensors. Hence, the combination of physiological measurements and VR applications seems promising. Several approaches have investigated the applicability and benefits of this combination for various fields of applications. However, the range of possible application fields, coupled with potentially useful and beneficial physiological parameters, types of sensor, target variables and factors, and analysis approaches and techniques is manifold. This article provides a systematic overview and an extensive state-of-the-art review of the usage of physiological measurements in VR. We identified 1,119 works that make use of physiological measurements in VR. Within these, we identified 32 approaches that focus on the classification of characteristics of experience, common in VR applications. The first part of this review categorizes the 1,119 works by field of application, i.e. therapy, training, entertainment, and communication and interaction, as well as by the specific target factors and variables measured by the physiological parameters. An additional category summarizes general VR approaches applicable to all specific fields of application since they target typical VR qualities. In the second part of this review, we analyze the target factors and variables regarding the respective methods used for an automatic analysis and, potentially, classification. For example, we highlight which measurement setups have been proven to be sensitive enough to distinguish different levels of arousal, valence, anxiety, stress, or cognitive workload in the virtual realm. This work may prove useful for all researchers wanting to use physiological data in VR and who want to have a good overview of prior approaches taken, their benefits and potential drawbacks.
In network research, reproducibility of experiments is not always easy to achieve. Infrastructures are cumbersome to set up or are not available due to vendor-specific devices. Emulators try to overcome those issues to a given extent and are available in different service models. Unfortunately, the usability of emulators requires time-consuming efforts and a deep understanding of their functionality. At first, we analyze to which extent currently available open-source emulators support network configurations and how user-friendly they are. With these insights, we describe, how an ease-to-use emulator is implemented and may run as a Network Emulator as a Service (NEaaS). Therefore, virtualization plays a major role in order to deploy a NEaaS based on Kathará.