Deliverable D19

Communications in Parallel and Distributed Systems

• Introduction to the deliverable
• Contents of the deliverable

Introduction to Deliverable D19

Deliverable D19 has initially scheduled at +24. In the third year of QMIPS, the Workpackage WP3 was redesigned, and D19 was re-scheduled at +36.

Six papers are contributed to this deliverable. Paper D19-1, ``Communications in parallel and distributed systems: a survey'' was delivered at +24. The five other papers, delivered at +36, describe advances that have been made during the QMIPS project on the topic of polling systems.

Polling systems are queueing systems in which servers (usually, a single server) attends several queues according to various service and routing rules. These systems are natural representation of the token protocols, widely used for communications over a shared medium, either at the physical level (token rings) or at the software level (bus arbitration, master/slave protocols). They are therefore of central importance in the study of the performance of distributed systems, especially given the current trend for such system to be connected by local interconnection networks.

Paper D19-2, ``Polling systems'' is a survey on the field of polling system analysis. Papers D19-3, D19-4, D19-5 and D19-6 describe recent technical advances in that field.

Contents of the Deliverable

D19-1

Communications in parallel and distributed systems: a survey, A. Jean-Marie, P. Mussi and M. Syska.

D19-2

Polling systems, O.J. Boxma. In: From Universal Morphisms to Megabytes: a Baayen Space Odyssey, eds. K.R. Apt, A. Schrijver and N.M. Temme (CWI, Amsterdam, december 1994), pp. 215-230. (front page).

D19-3

Polling models with threshold switching, O.J. Boxma, G.M. Koole, I. Mitrani. In part II of Quantitative Models in Parallel Systems. In Quantitative Methods in Parallel Systems, eds. F. Baccelli and I. Mitrani, Springer, Berlin, 1995. Part of this work appears in Proc. MASCOTS '95, eds. P. Dowd and E. Gelenbe, IEEE Computer Society Press, Los Alamitos (CA), 1995, pp. 84-89.

D19-4

A polling model with threshold switching, D.G. Down, O.J. Boxma. In Proceedings NTS-12 Conference, Otaniemi, Espoo, Finland, August 22-24, 1995. (front page).

D19-5

Polling models with and without switchover times, S.C. Borst and O. Boxma. CWI Report BS-R9421, to appear in Oper. Res.. (front page).

D19-6

The use of service limits for efficient operation of multi-station single-medium communication systems, S.C. Borst, O. Boxma and H. Levy. To appear in IEEE Trans. Networking, October 1995. (front page).