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Section: New Results

Scaling Methods

Participants : Philippe Robert, Wen Sun, Mohammadreza Aghajani.

Fluid Limits in Wireless Networks

This is a collaboration with Amandine Veber (CMAP, École Polytechnique). The goal is to investigate the stability properties of wireless networks when the bandwidth allocated to a node is proportional to a function of its backlog: if a node of this network has $x$ requests to transmit, then it receives a fraction of the capacity proportional to $log(1+x)$, the logarithm of its current load. A fluid scaling analysis of such a network is presented. We have shown that the interaction of several time scales plays an important role in the evolution of such a system, in particular its coordinates may live on very different time and space scales. As a consequence, the associated stochastic processes turn out to have unusual scaling behaviors which give an interesting fairness property to this class of algorithms. A heavy traffic limit theorem for the invariant distribution has also been proved. A generalization to the resource sharing algorithm for which the $log$ function is replaced by an increasing function. This year we completed the analysis of a star network topology with multiple nodes. Several scalings were used to describe the fluid limit behaviour.

The Time Scales of a Transient Network

The Distributed Hash Table (DHTs) consists of a large set of nodes connected through the Internet. Each file contained in the DHT is stored in a small subset of these nodes. Each node breaks down periodically and it is necessary to have back-up mechanisms in order to avoid data loss. A trade-off is necessary between the bandwidth and the memory used for this back-up mechanism and the data loss rate. Back-up mechanisms already exist and have been studied thanks to simulation. To our knowledge, no theoretical study exists on this topic. With a very simple centralized model, we have been able to emphasise a trade-off between capacity and life-time with respect to the duplication rate. From a mathematical point of view, we are currently studying different time scales of the system with an averaging phenomenon.