This paper deals with the problem of maintaining a distributed directory server, that enables us to keep track of mobile users in a distributed network in the presence of concurrent requests. The paper uses the graph-theoretic concept of regional matching for implementing efficient tracking mechanisms. The communication overhead of our tracking mechanism is within a polylogarithmic factor of the lower bound. 1 Introduction Since the primary function of a communication network is to provide communication facilities between users and processes in the system, one of the key problems such a network faces is the need to be able to Department of Mathematics and Lab. for Computer Science, M.I.T., Cambridge, MA 02139, USA. E-mail: baruch@theory.lcs.mit.edu. Supported by Air Force Contract TNDGAFOSR-86-0078, ARO contract DAAL03-86-K0171, NSF contract CCR8611442, DARPA contract N00014-89J -1988, and a special grant from IBM. y Departmentof Applied Mathematicsand Computer Science, The Weizm...

Modern networking applications replicate data and services widely, leading to a need for location-independent routing---the ability to route queries to objects using names independent of the objects' physical locations. Two important properties of such a routing infrastructure are routing locality and rapid adaptation to arriving and departing nodes. We show how these two properties can be efficiently achieved for certain network topologies. To do this, we present a new distributed algorithm that can solve the nearest-neighbor problem for these networks. We describe our solution in the context of Tapestry, an overlay network infrastructure that employs techniques proposed by Plaxton et al. [24].

Let G = (V; E) be an undirected weighted graph with jV j = n and jEj = m. Let k 1 be an integer. We show that G = (V; E) can be preprocessed in O(kmn ) expected time, constructing a data structure of size O(kn ), such that any subsequent distance query can be answered, approximately, in O(k) time. The approximate distance returned is of stretch at most 2k \Gamma 1, i.e., the quotient obtained by dividing the estimated distance by the actual distance lies between 1 and 2k \Gamma 1. We show that a 1963 girth conjecture of Erdos, implies ) space is needed in the worst case for any real stretch strictly smaller than 2k + 1. The space requirement of our algorithm is, therefore, essentially optimal.

We describe several compact routing schemes for general weighted undirected networks. Our schemes are simple and easy to implement. The routing tables stored at the nodes of the network are all very small. The headers attached to the routed messages, including the name of the destination, are extremely short. The routing decision at each node takes constant time. Yet, the stretch of these routing schemes, i.e., the worst ratio between the cost of the path on which a packet is routed and the cost of the cheapest path from source to destination, is a small constant. Our schemes achieve a near-optimal tradeoff between the size of the routing tables used and the resulting stretch. More specifically, we obtain: 1. A routing scheme that uses only ~ O(n 1=2) bits of memory at each node of an n-node network that has stretch 3. The space is optimal, up to logarithmic factors, in the sense that

This paper deals with the file allocation problem [BFR92] concerning the dynamic optimization of communication costs to access data in a distributed environment. We develop a dynamic file re-allocation strategy that adapts on-line to a sequence of read and write requests whose location and relative frequencies are completely unpredictable. This is achieved by replicating the file in response to read requests and migrating the file in response to write requests while paying the associated communications costs, so as to be closer to processors that access it frequently. We develop first explicit deterministic on-line strategy assuming existence of global information about the state of the network; previous (deterministic) solutions were complicated and more expensive. Our solution has (optimal) logarithmic competitive ratio. The paper also contains the first explicit deterministic data migration [BS89] algorithm achieving the best known competitive ratio for this problem. Using somewhat ...

In this paper we show that, given a graph and parameters ffi and r, we can find either a Kr;r minor or an edge-cut of size O(mr=ffi) whose removal yields components of weak diameter O(r 2 ffi); i.e., every pair of nodes in such a component are at distance O(r 2 ffi) in the original graph. Using this lemma, we improve the best known bounds for the min-cut max-flow ratio for multicommodity flows in graphs with forbidden small minors. In general graphs, it was known that the ratio is O(log k) for the uniform-demand case (the case where there is a unit-demand commodity between every pair of nodes), and that the ratio is O(log 2 k) for arbitrary demands, where k is the number of commodities. In this paper we show that for graphs excluding any fixed graph as a minor (e.g. planar graphs or bounded-genus graphs), the ratio is O(1) for the uniform-demand case and O(log k) for the arbitrary demand case. For such graphs, our method yields min-ratio cut approximation algorithms wit...

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This survey concerns the role of data structures for compactly storing and representing various types of information in a localized and distributed fashion. Traditional approaches to data representation are based on global data structures, which require access to the entire structure even if the sought information involves only a small and local set of entities. In contrast, localized data representation schemes are based on breaking the information into small local pieces, or labels, selected in a way that allows one to infer information regarding a small set of entities directly from their labels, without using any additional (global) information. The survey focuses on combinatorial and algorithmic techniques, and covers complexity results on various applications, including compact localized schemes for message routing in communication networks, and adjacency and distance labeling schemes.

This paper studies compact routing schemes for networks with low doubling dimension. Two variants are explored, name-independent routing and labeled routing. The key results obtained for this model are the following. First, we provide the first name-independent solution. Specifically, we achieve constant stretch and polylogarithmic storage. Second, we obtain the first truly scale-free solutions, namely, the network’s aspect ratio is not a factor in the stretch. Scale-free schemes are given for three problem models: name-independent routing on graphs, labeled routing on metric spaces, and labeled routing on graphs. Third, we prove a lower bound requiring linear storage for stretch < 3 schemes. This has the important ramification of separating for the first time the name-independent problem model from the labeled model for these networks, since compact stretch-1+ε labeled schemes are known to be possible.

We study the problem of routing in doubling metrics, and show how to perform hierarchical routing in such metrics with small stretch and compact routing tables (i.e., with small amount of routing information stored at each vertex). We say that a metric (X, d) has doubling dimension dim(X) at most α if every set of diameter D can be covered by 2 α sets of diameter D/2. (A doubling metric is one whose doubling dimension dim(X) is a constant.) We show how to perform (1 + τ)-stretch routing on metrics for any 0 < τ ≤ 1 with routing tables of size at most (α/τ) O(α) log 2 ∆ bits with only (α/τ) O(α) log ∆ entries, where ∆ is the diameter of the graph; hence the number of routing table entries is just τ −O(1) log ∆ for doubling metrics. These results extend and improve on those of Talwar (2004). We also give better constructions of sparse spanners for doubling metrics than those obtained from the routing tables above; for τ> 0, we give algorithms to construct (1 + τ)stretch spanners for a metric (X, d) with maximum degree at most (2 + 1/τ) O(dim(X)) , matching the results of Das et al. for Euclidean metrics.