In a system in which noncooperative agents share a common resource, we propose the ratio between the worst possible Nash equilibrium and the social optimum as a measure of the effectiveness of the system. Deriving upper and lower bounds for this ratio in a model in which several agents share a very simple network leads to some interesting mathematics, results, and open problems.

The Generalized Processor Sharing (GPS) discipline is proven to have two desirable properties: (a) it can provide an end-to-end bounded-delay service to a session whose traffic is constrained by a leaky bucket; (b) it can ensure fair allocation of bandwidth among all backlogged sessions regardless of whether or not their traffic is constrained. The former property is the basis for supporting guaranteed service traffic while the later property is important for supporting best-effort service traffic. Since GPS uses an idealized fluid model which cannot be realized in the real world, various packet approximation algorithms of GPS have been proposed. Among these, Weighted Fair Queueing (WFQ) also known as Packet Generalized Processor Sharing (PGPS) has been considered to be the best one in terms of accuracy. In particular, it has been proven that the delay bound provided by WFQ is within one packet transmission time of that provided by GPS. In this paper, we will show that, contrary to pop...

describe MPICH, unique among existing implementations in its design goal of combining portability with high performance. We document its portability and performance and describe the architecture by which these features are simultaneously achieved. We also discuss the set of tools that accompany the free

), when combined with Leaky Bucket admission control, allows the network to make a wide range of worst-case performance guarantees on throughput and delay. The scheme is flexible in that d~erent users may be given widely different performance guarantees, and is efilcient in that each of the servers

programs, the average ti me requi red by the Omega test to determi ne the di recti on vectors for an array pai ri s less than 500 secs on a 12 MIPS workstati on. The Omega testi based on an extensi n of Four i0-Motzki var i ble eli937 ti n (aliB: r programmiA method) toi nteger programmi ng, and has worst-case

Multimedia communication involving digital audio and/or digital video has rather strict delay requirements. A real-time channel is defined in this paper as a simplex connection between a source and a destination characterized by parameters representing the performance requirements of the client. A

We consider the problem of routing traffic to optimize the performance of a congested network. We are given a network, a rate of traffic between each pair of nodes, and a latency function for each edge specifying the time needed to traverse the edge given its congestion; the objective is to route

the solution to a nonlinear programming relaxation. This relaxation can be interpreted both as a semidefinite program and as an eigenvalue minimization problem. The best previously known approximation algorithms for these problems had performance guarantees of ...

with large margins. Compared to Vapnik's algorithm, however, ours is much simpler to implement, and much more efficient in terms of computation time. We also show that our algorithm can be efficiently used in very high dimensional spaces using kernel functions. We performed some experiments using our

the sequences and e ciently answer similarity queries. We provide experimental results which show that our method is superior to search based on sequential scanning. Our experiments show that a few coefficients (1-3) are adequate to provide good performance. The performance gain of our method increases