Sharif Digital Repository

Cutting a cake is a metaphor for the problem of dividing a resource (cake) among several agents. The problem becomes non-trivial when the agents have different valuations for different parts of the cake (i.e. one agent may like chocolate while the other may like cream). A fair division of the cake is one that takes into account the individual valuations of agents and partitions the cake based on some fairness criterion. Fair division may be accomplished in a distributed or centralized way. Due to its natural and practical appeal, it has been a subject of study in economics under the topic of 'Fair Division'. To best of our knowledge the role of partial information in fair division has not... 

In cloud investment markets, consumers are looking for the lowest cost and a desirable fairness while providers are looking for strategies to achieve the highest possible profit and return. Most existing models for auction-based resource allocation in cloud environments only consider the overall profit increase and ignore the profit of each participant individually or the difference between the rich and the poor participants. This paper proposes a multi-dimensional fairness combinatorial double auction (MDFCDA) model which strikes a balance between the revenue and the fairness among participants. We solve a winner determination problem (WDP) through integer programming which incorporates the... 

A semicentralized joint cell muting and user scheduling scheme for interference coordination in a multicell network is proposed under two different temporal fairness criteria. In the proposed scheme, at a decision instant, each base station (BS) in the multicell network employs a cell-level scheduler to nominate one user for each of its inner and outer sections and their available transmission rates to a network-level scheduler which then computes the potential overall transmission rate for each muting pattern. Subsequently, the network-level scheduler selects one pattern to unmute, out of all the available patterns. This decision is shared with all cell-level schedulers which then forward... 

One of the important yet insufficiently studied subjects in fair allocation is the externality effect among agents. For a resource allocation problem, externalities imply that the share allocated to an agent may affect the utilities of other agents. In this paper, we conduct a study of fair allocation of indivisible goods when the externalities are not negligible. Inspired by the models in the context of network diffusion, we present a simple and natural model, namely network externalities, to capture the externalities. To evaluate fairness in the network externalities model, we generalize the idea behind the notion of maximin-share (MMS) to achieve a new criterion, namely,... 

In this paper, the problem of resource allocation at an Ad hoc network with nodes not using any infrastructure to cooperate with each other is considered. By using a simple interference model in wireless links, the convergence and stability of a fair resource allocation scheme in the absence of delay is investigated. Also, the local stability of the scheme in the presence of upper-bounded delay is verified. Simulations results illustrate the convergence and fairness of this scheme considering different initial states for different sources. The performance of the scheme in the presence of different disturbances for each flow in transient and steady state along with its local stability in the... 

COVID-19 pandemic caused an increasing demand for online academic classes, which led to the demand for effective online exams with regards to limitations on time and resources. Consequently, holding online exams with sufficient reliability and effectiveness became one of the most critical and challenging subjects in higher education. Therefore, it is essential to have a preventive algorithm to allocate time and financial resources effectively. In the present study, a fair test with sufficient validity is first defined, and then by analogy with an engineering product, the design process is implemented on it. For this purpose, a hybrid method based on FMEA, which is a preventive method to... 

In this paper, a new search algorithm in heterogeneous hierarchical unstructured p2p networks is presented which takes into account heterogeneity of peers such as upload bandwidth, life time in the network and process capacity in its peer discovery policy as factors that influence download performance and user satisfaction. One advantage of this algorithm is that it can be performed in a completely unstructured network without imposing any change on network topology and file replication. However, it obviously decreases file download time as it is designed to discover broad-bandwidth nodes with a higher probability. This property results in a fair distribution of load over heterogeneous p2p... 

We consider a wireless network with one source, multiple relays and multiple destinations. The source and the relays are assumed to utilize multiple antennas. To reduce the effects of the frequency selective source-to-relay and relay-to-destination channels, and to compensate for the different delays of the various signal paths in the network and for multi-user interference and noise, the source, the relays and the destinations apply linear filtering to their signals. The proposed scheme generalizes the recently proposed filter-and-forward relaying scheme. We propose an iterative algorithm to solve the problem of maximizing the quality-of-service at the destinations. Simulation results... 

Reo is an exogenous coordination language for synthesizing components participating in a component-based system. The notion of Bchi automaton over streams of records (BAR for short) is a proposed operational semantics for Reo that covers several aspects of coordination strategies such as synchronization, context dependencies and fairness constraints. In this paper and for the purpose of modeling real-time coordination systems specified by Reo, we present a timed version of BARs as the acceptors of timed streams of records. We show that timed BAR and its streams of records based semantics are more standard and also more expressive than timed constraint automaton which is the first proposed... 

This paper presents a practical scheme that can be used for allocating the transmission loss to generators and loads. In this scheme first the share of a generator or load on the current through a branch is determined using Z-bus modified matrix. Then the current components are decomposed and the branch loss allocation is obtained. A motivation of proposed scheme is to improve the results of Z-bus method and to reach more fair allocation. The proposed scheme has been implemented and tested on several networks. To achieve practical and applicable results, the proposed scheme is simulated and compared on the transmission network (400kv) of Khorasan region in Iran and the 14-bus standard IEEE... 

This paper models a novel and practical bi-objective hub-location problem under a centralized carrier collaboration framework between one holding company and multiple carriers. The holding company first establishes a hub-and-spoke network in order to locate p hubs and to assign the center nodes to the located hubs. Then, it allocates the transportation routes of the hub network to the carriers. In contrast, the carriers should select an appropriate vehicle type to serve the transportation requests in a green hub network. The carriers are also able to meet the transportation requests within a certain time-window based on a soft time-window mechanism. Moreover, aiming to emphasize green... 

In this paper, we study the secrecy throughput of a full-duplex wireless powered communication network (WPCN) for Internet of Things (IoT). The WPCN consists of a full-duplex multiantenna base station (BS) and a number of sensor nodes. The BS transmits energy all the time, and each node harvests energy prior to its transmission time slot. The nodes sequentially transmit their confidential information to the BS, and the other nodes are considered as potential eavesdroppers. We first aim to optimize the sum secrecy throughput of the nodes. The optimization variables are the duration of the time slots and the BS beamforming vectors in different time slots. The optimization problem is shown to... 

Constraint automata are formalisms to describe the behavior and possible data flow in coordination models. In this paper we introduce a linear time temporal logic, called temporal logic of steps (TLS), for specifying the executions of constraint automata. TLS is the first attempt in presenting a linear temporal logic for constraint automata. Having TLS in hand, we are able to design model checking algorithms for verification of concurrent systems modeled by constraint automata. © 2008 Springer-Verlag