Growth of distributed systems has attained unstoppable momentum. If we better understood how to think about, analyze, and design distributed systems, we could direct their implementation with more confidence.

This paper proposes a mechanism for equation-based congestion control for unicast traffic. Most best-effort traffic in the current Internet is well-served by the dominant transport protocol, TCP. However, traffic such as best-effort unicast streaming multimedia could find use for a TCP

Large grain data flow (LGDF) programming is natural and convenient for describing digital signal processing (DSP) systems, but its runtime overhead is costly in real time or cost-sensitive applications. In some situations, designers are not willing to squander computing resources for the sake

Distributed computing systems are being built and used more and more frequently. This distributod computing revolution makes the reliability of distributed systems an important concern. It is fairly well-understood how to connect hardware so that most components can continue to work when others

The difficulty of developing reliable distributed softwme is an impediment to applying distributed computing technology in many settings. Expeti _ with the Isis system suggests that a structured approach based on virtually synchronous _ groups yields systems that are substantially easier to develop

techniques which can be used to verify the correctness of workflow procedures. This paper introduces workflow management as an application domain for Petri nets, presents state-of-the-art results with respect to the verification of workflows, and highlights some Petri-net-based workflow tools.

We describe a platform for context-aware computing which enables applications to follow mobile users as they move around a building. The platform is particularly suitable for richly equipped, networked environments. The only item a user is required to carry is a small sensor tag, which identifies

A federated database system (FDBS) is a collection of cooperating database systems that are autonomous and possibly heterogeneous. In this paper, we define a reference architecture for distributed database management systems from system and schema viewpoints and show how various FDBS architectures

The proliferation of applications that must reliably distribute bulk data to a large number of autonomous clients motivates the design of new multicast and broadcast prot.ocols. We describe an ideal, fully scalable protocol for these applications that we call a digital fountain. A digital fountain

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