Sharif Digital Repository

At a first glance, transmitting update information to a geographic region in the virtual space seems to be an attractive primitive in Massively Multiplayer Online Gaming (MMOG) applications where players are constantly moving and need to send updates to their neighbors who are in the same region of the virtual space. The system would become more scalable if entities did not need to keep track of each other or send messages directly to one another. Rather, an entity could just send a message to a specific region in the virtual space (its area of effect), as opposed to sending packets to specific IP addresses, significantly reducing tracking and routing overhead. Fundamentally speaking, update... 

As massively multiuser virtual environments (MMVEs) expand in terms of size and user population, they tend toward using P2P architectures as a way to provide scalability without the need for large centralized resources. Distributed hash table (DHT)-based networks have been introduced as a promising option for overlay-based distributed massively multiuser virtual environment applications. However, overlay latency stretch seriously affects MMVE performance where QoS is crucial for real-time user collaboration. This work includes a series of efforts in the alleviation of such undesired latency. Our approach to latency mitigation consists of two phases. First, we propose a position-based ID... 

Predicting latency between nodes on the internet can have a significant impact on the performance of many services that use latency distances among nodes as a decision making input. Coordinate-based approaches are among the family of latency prediction techniques where latency between each pair of nodes is modeled as the virtual distance among those nodes over a virtual system. This article proposes the Decentralized Coordinate System (DCS) as a fully distributed system that does not rely on any infrastructure support from the underlying network. DCS uses a two-phase algorithm: first, each host is assigned rough coordinates, then, the rough estimation is refined in a way that it gradually... 

predicting the latency between hosts in the internet can play a significant rolein the improvement of the performance of many services that use latency distances among hosts as a decision making input. Although, the information regarding the point to point delay among internet peers is required in many applications, such information is not easily available to the peers. Latency data acquisition requires a considerableamount of measurements to be performed at each node in order for that node to keep a recordof its latency to all the other nodes. Moreover, the measurements need to be regularly repeated in order to be updatedagainst the network dynamics where the latency values are frequently... 

The rapid growth of the world-wide web poses unprecedented scaling challenges for general-purpose crawlers and search engines. A focused crawler aims at selectively seek out pages that are relevant to a pre-defined set of topics. Besides specifying topics by some keywords, it is customary also to use some exemplary documents to compute the similarity of a given web document to the topic. In this paper we Introduce a new hybride focused crawler, which uses link structure of documents as well as similarity of pages to the topic to crawl the web © 2006 HEE  

Ontology Alignment is a process for finding related entities of different ontologies. This paper discusses the results of our research in this area. One of them is a formulation for a new structural measure which extends famous related works. In this measure with a special attention to the transitive properties, it is tried to increase recall with less harm on precision. Second contribution is a new method for compound measure creation without any need to the mapping extraction phase. Effectiveness of these ideas is discussed and quantitative evaluations are explained in this paper. Copyright © 2006, Hassan Abolhassani, Babak Bagheri Hariri, & Seyed H. Haeri  

Ontology matching is a process for selection of a good alignment across entities of two (or more) ontologies. This can be viewed as a two-phase process of (1) applying a similarity measure to find the correspondence of each pair of entities from two ontologies, and (2) extraction of an optimal or near optimal mapping. This paper is focused on the second phase and introduces our evolutionary approach for that. To be able to do so, we need a mechanism to score different possible mappings. Our solution is a weighting mechanism named coincidence-based weighting. A genetic algorithm is then introduced to create better mappings in successive iterations. We will explain how we code a mapping as... 

A novel active queue management (AQM) method is proposed. This method, named NN-RED, is based on the use of a neural network for early congestion prediction. By simulations, it is demonstrated that the performance of the proposed approach is better than the random early detection (RED) method that is currently known as one of the best AQM methods in solving congestion problems. © The Institution of Engineering and Technology 2007  

In this study, a detector/estimator is proposed for compressed sensing radars, which does not need to reconstruct the radar signal, and which works directly from compressive measurements. More precisely, through direct processing of the measurements, and without the need for reconstructing the original radar signal, the system performs target detection, and then estimates range, Doppler frequency shift and radar cross section in the presence of a Gaussian clutter. It can be seen that for large compression ratios, the detection performance and estimation quality is comparable with a common radar system while having a much lower data rate and with less computational load  

The main motivation behind compressive sensing is to reduce the sampling rate at the input of a digital signal processing system. However, if for processing the sensed signal one requires to reconstruct the corresponding Nyquist samples, then the data rate will be again high in the processing stages of the overall system. Therefore, it is preferred that the desired processing task is done directly on the compressive measurements, without the need for the reconstruction of the Nyquist samples. This paper addresses the case in which the processing task is “detection” (the existence) of a sparse signal in additive white Gaussian noise, with applications e.g. in radar systems. Moreover, we will... 

Various methods using different measures have been proposed for ontology alignment. Therefore, it is necessary to evaluate the effectiveness of such measures to select better ones for more quality alignment. Current approaches for comparing these measures, are highly dependent on alignment frameworks, which may cause unreal results. In this paper, we propose a framework independent evaluation method, and discuss results of applying it to famous existing string measures. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006  

Resilient Packet Ring (RPR) that has been standardized as IEEE 802.17 is a MAC layer protocol designed for data centric metropolitan area network applications. A well-designed RPR network would be able to offer QoS guarantee for throughput and delay sensitive data classes in addition to providing other types of low cost best effort services. Careful network planning would be required to allow successful provisioning of classA services with strict delay and jitter requirements over RPR networks. This would require the knowledge of the dependency of delay and jitter for classA traffic on the load that is added to the ring. In this article, we propose an algorithm to estimate the dependency of... 

Massively Multiuser Virtual Environment (MMVE) applications have the challenge of update message exchange among a large number of users. Real-time collaboration in the virtual environments requires the updates to be exchanged with the minimum end-to-end latency and overhead. This article proposes a new clustering technique to improve the update message exchange efficiency in MMVE applications. The proposed solution is based on the use of ant clustering technique in order to cluster the users based on their geographical proximity. These clusters can be used as localized routing regions in the hierarchical routing architecture and prevent local messages to be routed through long distance hops.... 

Background/Objectives: Curcumin, a natural polyphenol compound in the spice turmeric, has been found to have potent anti-oxidative and anti-inflammatory activity. Curcumin may treat non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) through its beneficial effects on biomarkers of oxidative stress (OS) and inflammation, which are considered as two feature of this disease. However, the effects of curcumin on NAFLD have been remained poorly understood. This investigation evaluated the effects of administrating curcumin on metabolic status in NAFLD patients. Subjects/Methods: Fifty-eight NAFLD patients participated in a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled parallel design of study. The subjects... 

In this paper we will propose a novel distributed architecture for overlay tree construction in collaborative virtual environments that is unlimitedly scalable due to its fully decentralized nature. The routing issue over this architecture will later be discussed and several forwarding schemes based on distributed hash tables (DHT) will be proposed. One of the main concerns for a routing algorithm is to keep a trade-off between the algorithm locality and the algorithm performance. In a global algorithm where nodes make the forwarding decision based on the information gathered from all other nodes in the network, the routing performance may obviously be better. However such a large group... 

Although collaborative distributed simulations and virtual environments (VE) have been an active area of research in the past few years, they have recently gained even more attention due to the emergence of online gaming, emergency simulation and planning systems, and disaster management applications. Such environments combine graphics, haptics, animations and networking to create interactive multimodal worlds that allows participants to collaborate in real-time. Massively Multiplayer Online Gaming (MMOG), perhaps the most widely deployed practical application of distributed virtual environments, allows players to act together concurrently in a virtual world over the Internet. IP... 

This article proposes a new architecture for distributed data management and update massage exchange in massively multiuser virtual environments. The key points in the design of such environments are scalability and QoS-aware message delivery. Therefore it requires robust distributed algorithms in a dynamic peer-to-peer system with frequent node arrivals and departures. Our proposed approach is mainly based on distributed hash tables (DHTs) in order to achieve a decentralized system where any participating node can efficiently retrieve the updates associated with a given object. Therefore, the responsibility of maintaining the mapping from names to values is distributed among the nodes in a...