Abstract: In wireless networks, throughput optimization is an essential performance objective that cannot be adequately characterized by a single criterion (such as the minimum transmitted or sum-delivered throughput) and should be specified over all source-destination pairs as a rate region. For a simple and yet fundamental model of tandem networks, a cross-layer optimization framework is formulated to derive the maximum throughput region for saturated multicast traffic. The contents of network flows are specified through network coding (or plain routing) in network layer and the throughput rates are jointly optimized in medium access control layer over fixed set of conflict-free transmission schedules (or optimized over transmission probabilities in random access). If the network model incorporates bursty sources and allows packet queues to empty, the objective is to specify the stability region as the set of maximum throughput rates that can be sustained with finite packet delay. Dynamic queue management strategies are used to expand the stability region toward the maximum throughput region. Network coding improves throughput rates over plain routing and achieves the largest gains for broadcast communication and intermediate network sizes. Throughput optimization imposes fundamental tradeoffs with transmission and processing energy costs such that the throughput-optimal operation is not necessarily energy efficient.

Abstract: A system for service queue management is disclosed including a terminal controlled by the system having a processing platform to generate service queue information for a user, and a mechanism for the user to request or receive the service queue information. The processing platform preferably transmits promotions related to goods and services associated with the service queue information to a user. The mechanism for the user to request or receive service queue information may preferably include a user's mobile communications device or a manually-activated device located on the terminal. Service queue information may include a queue number, next queue number to be issued, estimated wait time for service, a predicted time of service, time of issuance of ticket, predicted queue-waiting time, marketing messages, instructions for use of said ticket dispenser, and average queue-waiting time.

Abstract: The present invention provides a system and method for assessing the status of work waiting for service in a work queue or a work pool. Work items are placed in the work queue or work pool and have a service time goal. The work items in the work queue or work pool are scanned and a required queue position for each work item is calculated according to the amount of time remaining prior to the expiration of the service time goal and weighted advance time for servicing of work items in the work queue or pool. An array of counters has elements which correspond to required queue positions. Upon the calculation of the required queue position for a work item, the counter corresponding to the required queue position is incremented. When all of the work items are scanned, the array of counters is analyzed to predict a future state of the work queue or work pool.

Abstract: This paper investigates the near-memoryless behavior of the service time for IEEE 802.11 saturated single-hop ad hoc networks. We show that the number of packets successfully transmitted by any node over a time interval follows a general distribution, which is close to a Poisson distribution with an upper bounded distribution distance. The bound on the distribution distance is almost constant and is mainly affected by some system parameters and very slightly by the number of active nodes in the network. We also show that the service time distribution can be approximated by a geometric distribution. We illustrate that the usage of discrete-time queuing analysis (M/Geo/1) near network saturation greatly simplifies the queuing analysis and leads to sufficiently accurate results for both the first order statistics and the probability distribution of the number of packets in the queuing system. Computer simulation results demonstrate that the M/Geo/1 queuing model is very accurate.

Abstract: Disclosed are embodiments of a vehicle-to-vehicle traffic queue information communication system, a traffic queue information communication device, and method. The system and method embodiments incorporate the use of multiple vehicles. Each vehicle is equipped with a traffic queue information communication device. Each traffic queue information communication device can be used to determine if its corresponding vehicle has entered or exited a queue in a single lane of traffic. When the vehicle is in a queue, the device can communicate with the immediately adjacent vehicles in front and behind. Specifically, it can receive data from the preceding vehicle in the queue and use the received data to determine its position in the queue as well as the estimated time it will take to travel through the queue. Revised data can then be transmitted by the device to the next vehicle in the queue for making the same determinations.

Abstract: A method of managing multi-player game input as single-player game input includes building a command queue, the command queue being a series of time-slices; extracting a most recent time-slice from the command queue, the most recent time-slice including at least one command from difference inputs of the multi-player input; building alternate command queues with information extracted from the most recent time-slice; analyzing the command queue and the alternate command queues to determine an optimum command queue, the optimum command queue including commands from at least one input of the multi-player input; and outputting the optimum command queue as the single-player game input.

Abstract: Congestion is an important issue which researchers focus on in the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) network environment. To keep the stability of the whole network, congestion control algorithms have been extensively studied. Queue management method employed by the routers is one of the important issues in the congestion control study. Active Queue Management (AQM) has been proposed as a router-based mechanism for early detection of congestion inside the network. In this study, we are comparing AQM two popular queue management methods, Random Early Detection (RED) and droptail, in different aspects, such as throughput and fairness Index. The comparison results indicate RED performed slightly better with higher throughput and higher fairness Index than droptail. Simulation is done by using Network Simulator (NS2) and the graphs are drawn using X- graph.

Abstract: This article considers a batch service polling system. We first study the case in which the server visits the queues cyclically, considering three different service regimes: gated, exhaustive, and globally gated. We subsequently analyze the case (the so-called "Israeli Queue") in which the server first visits the queue with the "oldest" customer. In both cases, queue lengths and waiting times are the main performance measures under consideration.

Abstract: This paper examines congestion control issues for TCP flows that require in-network processing on the fly in network elements such as gateways, proxies, firewalls and even routers. Applications of these flows are increasingly abundant in the future as the Internet evolves. Since these flows require use of CPUs in network elements, both bandwidth and CPU resources can be a bottleneck and thus congestion control must deal with ldquocongestionrdquo on both of these resources. In this paper, we show that conventional TCP/AQM schemes can significantly lose throughput and suffer harmful unfairness in this environment, particularly when CPU cycles become more scarce (which is likely the trend given the recent explosive growth rate of bandwidth). As a solution to this problem, we establish a notion of dual-resource proportional fairness and propose an AQM scheme, called Dual-Resource Queue (DRQ), that can closely approximate proportional fairness for TCP Reno sources with in-network processing requirements. DRQ is scalable because it does not maintain per-flow states while minimizing communication among different resource queues, and is also incrementally deployable because of no required change in TCP stacks. The simulation study shows that DRQ approximates proportional fairness without much implementation cost and even an incremental deployment of DRQ at the edge of the Internet improves the fairness and throughput of these TCP flows. Our work is at its early stage and might lead to an interesting development in congestion control research.

Abstract: A system and method for performing dynamic request routing based on broadcast depth queue information are provided. Each processor chip in the system may use a synchronized heartbeat signal it generates to provide queue depth information to each of the other processor chips in the system. The queue depth information identifies a number of requests or amount of data in each of the queues of a processor chip that originated the heartbeat signal. The queue depth information from each of the processor chips in the system may be used by the processor chips in determining optimal routing paths for data from a source processor chip to a destination processor chip. As a result, the congestion of data for processing at each of the processor chips along each possible routing path may be taken into account when selecting to which processor chip to forward data.

Abstract: In this paper we consider a single-server cyclic polling system. Between visits to successive queues, the server is delayed by a random switch-over time. The order in which customers are served in each queue is determined by a priority level that is assigned to each customer at his arrival. For this situation the following service disciplines are considered: gated, exhaustive, and globally gated. We study the cycle time distribution, the waiting times for each customer type, the joint queue length distribution of all priority classes at all queues at polling epochs, and the steady-state marginal queue length distributions for each customer type.

Abstract: In this paper, we present a new MAC layer protocol for wireless sensor networks that reduces energy consumption and provides Quality of Service (QoS) guarantees through the use of service differentiation concept. The proposed protocol (named as EQ-MAC) consists of two sub-protocols: Classifier MAC (C-MAC), and Channel Access MAC (CA-MAC). C-MAC is responsible of classifying gathered data at sensor nodes based on its importance and then stores it in the appropriate queue of the node's queuing system. The CA-MAC is an energy efficient medium access mechanism that uses a hybrid approach of both scheduled and unscheduled schemes to gain a save in energy, and hence prolonging the network's lifetime. The save in energy achieved by CA-MAC is coming from the differentiation between control and data messages. Data messages are assigned scheduled slots with no contention (here we have to emphasize that slots are assigned only to those nodes which have data to send, this allows an efficient energy use of the TDMA slots), while short periodic control messages are assigned random access slots. To study the performance of the EQ-MAC protocol, several simulation experiments were conducted. EQ-MAC is compared with both Q-MAC and S-MAC protocols. Simulation results demonstrate that EQ-MAC outperforms the other two protocols and achieves a significant improvement in terms of energy expenditure. Under prioritized traffic, EQ-MAC is comparable to Q-MAC in average latency, while achieving less energy consumption.

Abstract: The basic operation of delay tolerant mobile sensor network (DTMSN) is for pervasive data gathering in networks with intermittent connectivity, where traditional data gathering methods can not be applied. In this paper, an efficient mobility prediction-based adaptive data gathering protocol (MPAD) based on the random waypoint mobility model tailored for DTMSN is proposed. In MPAD, a node independently makes decision to replicate messages and send them to the neighbor sensor nodes with a higher probability of meeting the sink node. MPAD consists of two components for data transmission and queue management. Data transmission makes decisions on when and where to transmit data messages according to the node delivery probability, and the queue management employs the message survival time to decide whether the message should be transmitted or dropped for minimizing the transmission overhead. Simulation results show that the proposed MPAD achieves the longer network lifetime and the higher message delivery ratio with the lower transmission overhead and data delivery delay than some other previous solutions designed for DTMSN, such as direct transmission, flooding and message fault tolerance-based data delivery protocol (FAD).

Abstract: The invention discloses an intelligent number calling system for queuing, which comprises a touch screen display, a printer, a controller, a server, a bar recognizer and a waiting time prediction module positioned in the controller The touch screen display displays a business type, a waiting number of people for each business type and a time section for transferring the present number to a secondary queuing system; the time section is calculated by a time section prediction module according to a queuing theory model or a prediction model; when a customer selects the business type via the touch screen, the printer will print a number sheet writing a number, business type, a bar number, a return time section or an indication for directly entering the secondary queuing system Therefore, the invention can be applied to a plurality of service places with longer waiting time, such as bank, post office, ticket office, etc with a view to greatly reducing the waiting time of consumer, effectively lowering down the blank number rate and improving the working efficiency of related departments

Abstract: In this paper, we consider several discrete-time priority queues with priority jumps. In a priority scheduling scheme with priority jumps, real-time and non-real-time packets arrive in separate queues, i.e., the high- and low-priority queue respectively. In order to deal with possibly excessive delays however, non-real-time packets in the low-priority queue can in the course of time jump to the high-priority queue. These packets are then treated in the high-priority queue as if they were real-time packets. Many criteria can be used to decide when packets of the low-priority queue jump to the high-priority queue. Some criteria have already been introduced in the literature, and we first overview this literature. Secondly, we propose and analyse a new priority scheme with priority jumps. Finally, we extensively compare all cited schemes. The schemes all differ in their jumping mechanism, based on a certain jumping criterion, and thus all have a different performance. We show the pros and cons of each jumping scheme.

Abstract: This paper considers a finite-buffer batch arrival and batch service queue with single and multiple vacations. The steady-state distributions of the number of customers in the queue at service completion, vacation termination, departure, arbitrary and pre-arrival epochs have been obtained. Finally, various performance measures such as average queue length, average waiting time, probability that the server is busy, blocking probabilities, etc. are discussed along with some numerical results. The effect of certain model parameters on the key performance measures have also been investigated. The model has potential application in several areas including manufacturing, internet web-server and telecommunication systems.

Abstract: Single-server queues in which the server takes vacations arise naturally as models for a wide range of computer, communication, and production systems. In almost all studies on vacation models, the vacation lengths are assumed to be independent of the arrival, service, workload, and queue length processes. In the present study, we allow the length of a vacation to depend on the length of the previous active period (viz. the period since the previous vacation). Under rather general assumptions regarding the offered work during active periods and vacations, we determine the steady-state workload distribution, both for single and multiple vacations. We conclude by discussing several special cases, including polling models, and relate our findings to results obtained earlier.

Abstract: Embodiments of the present invention are directed to methods for efficient queue management, and device implementations that incorporate these methods, for systems that include two or more electronic devices that share a queue residing in the memory of one of the two or more electronic devices. In certain embodiments of the present invention, a discard field or bit is included in each queue entry. The bit or field is set to a first value, such as the Boolean value “0,” by a producing device to indicate that the entry is valid, or, in other words, that the entry can be consumed by the consuming device. After placing entries into the queue, the producing device may subsequently remove one or more entries from the queue by setting the discard field or bit to a second value, such as Boolean value “1.” The consuming device removes each entry from the queue, in turn, as the consuming device processes queue entries, discarding, without further processing, those entries with the discard bit or field set to the second value.

Abstract: A method and system for determining a wait time for a transaction queue is disclosed. In the method, video data related to a first transaction queue is received. The video data is processed to determine a number of items presented by a first entity for a transaction in the first transaction queue. A total transaction time is estimated for the first entity based on the number of items presented by the first entity and a transaction time for each of the number of items. A wait time for the first transaction queue is determined based on the estimated total transaction time for the first entity. If the wait time for the first transaction queue is greater than a first threshold, then the availability of a second transaction queue is indicated to a second entity.

Abstract: In this paper, we used the accepted methodology of applying probabilistic-model checking to dynamic power management. For the first time, we analyze in this context a dynamic-power-management system with the two request priorities. First system we consider has a single two-priority service request queue. Second system to be analyzed has two single service request queues that are dedicated for high- and low-priority requests. We calculate optimal stochastic policies for the both systems. The same delay constraint is applied on the whole queue of the first system and on the high-priority (QH) queue of the second system. The comparison of the power consumptions of the two systems shows that the second system consumes up to 77% less power. We obtain that the power consumptions of both systems converge when the constraints become tighter. We demonstrate that, with the increased length of the QH service request queue of the second system, more power can be saved in applications with varying quality-of-service requirements. Our models and experiments can be easily generalized to N request priorities and different queue lengths.

Abstract: We consider a class of queueing networks referred to as "generalized constrained queueing networks" which form the basis of several different communication networks and information systems. These networks consist of a collection of queues such that only certain sets of queues can be concurrently served. Whenever a queue is served, the system receives a certain reward. Different rewards are obtained for serving different queues, and furthermore, the reward obtained for serving a queue depends on the set of concurrently served queues. We demonstrate that the dependence of the rewards on the schedules alter fundamental relations between performance metrics like throughput and stability. Specifically, maximizing the throughput is no longer equivalent to maximizing the stability region; we therefore need to maximize one subject to certain constraints on the other. Since stability is critical for bounding packet delays and buffer overflow, we focus on maximizing the throughput subject to stabilizing the system. We design provably optimal scheduling strategies that attain this goal by scheduling the queues for service based on the queue lengths and the rewards provided by different selections. The proposed scheduling strategies are however computationally complex. We subsequently develop techniques to reduce the complexity and yet attain the same throughput and stability region. We demonstrate that our framework is general enough to accommodate random rewards and random scheduling constraints.

Abstract: A packet switched node (router), a queuing system and a method for queuing packets are described herein that use tags and manipulate counters in a manner that eliminates the reordering of the packets after a Quality of Service (QoS) class had been altered in one or more of the packets.

Abstract: A computerized data storage system and a method for portioning performance among data areas on a hard disk drive. The system includes a management computer coupled to one or more host computers and a storage apparatus. The storage apparatus includes hard disk drives and a storage controller for partitioning the hard disk drives among data volumes in the storage apparatus and for assigning the data volumes to the host computer. A performance partitioning module on the hard disk drives utilizes a queue management table for forming a number of queues on memory of the hard disk drive. The queues receive READ and WRITE requests from the host computers and convey these requests to data areas assigned on recording media of the hard disk drive. After a request from a queue is executed, depending on a duration required for execution of a next request from the same queue, a gate between the queue and the data areas may be closed to allow requests from other queues an opportunity to access the data areas. In an alternative embodiment, requests of one queue are transferred to a new queue on another hard disk if a sufficient number of queues is not available on a current hard disk to satisfy the performance requirements.

Abstract: Active buffer management can improve the performance of Transmission Control Protocol-Internet Protocol-based networks. Random early detection (RED), an active queue management scheme, has been proposed by the Internet Engineering Task Force for next-generation Internet routers. RED uses a number of parameters, such as buffer thresholds, a packet drop probability and a weight parameter. RED suffers from low throughput and large delay-jitter and induces instability in networks. Previous attempts to improve the performance of RED were based on modifying the thresholds and drop probabilities. In this paper, we show that an optimal value of the weight parameter can improve the performance of RED, and then develop a framework to determine the optimal value of the weight parameter. We show that the optimal weight parameter obtained from our framework improves the performance of RED. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. This work was carried out when the first author was at University of Dayton, Ohio.