The increasing number of delay and loss critical services in packet networks require differentiated packet handling in the forwarding plane. Quality of Service (QoS) guarantees can be given for networks using resource reservation and admission control. However, such strategies require complex control plane extensions and might lead to higher operation expenditures. Network operators therefore often use over-provisioning and traffic differentiation to offer cheaper class of service quality in their internet protocol (IP) packet networks. Priority marking and forwarding of packetized data traffic can be realized mainly using different layer two and three mechanisms. The number of differentiated classes and their autonomous system (AS) internal implementation is at the operator’s choice. This paper proposes a concept of cross-domain and cross-layer priority signaling between packet switched networks to be used at the inter-AS peering points. It makes use of the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) as the predominantly used routing protocol for AS peering communication. A new BGP-4 path attribute is used to convey the structured priority information. The new concept ensures that all receiving AS peers are consistently and comprehensively informed about the QoS handling within the IP prefix originating AS. Based on this information, all ASes can perform close QoS treatment approximation in a cross-domain and cross-layer manner. The approach is now work in progress at the IETF.

The increasing number of delay and loss critical services in packet networks require differentiated packet handling in the forwarding plane. Quality of Service (QoS) guarantees can be given for networks using resource reservation and admission control. However, such strategies require complex control plane extensions and might lead to higher operation expenditures. Network operators therefore often use over-provisioning and traffic differentiation to offer cheaper Class of Service (CoS) quality in their internet protocol (IP) packet networks. The number of differentiated classes and their autonomous system (AS) internal implementation is at the operator’s choice. This paper proposes a signalling concept for inter-AS layer three Class Set signalling, supported classes, their encoding and packet rate limitations. It makes use of the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) as the predominantly used routing protocol for AS peering communication. The paper specifies two new nontransitive attributes, which enable adjacent peers to signal Class of Service capabilities and admission control limitations. The new "CoS Capability Attribute" and the “CoS Parameter Attribute" are simple data structures, which signal the classes, their per hop behaviour (PHB) ID code and the token bucket control performed at the ingress AS border router for rate limitation purposes. The denoted Class of Service forwarding support is meant as the AS externally available (transit) Class of Service support. The approach is now work in progress at the IETF.

This document focuses on Class of Service Interconnection at inter- domain peering points. It specifies two new non-transitive attributes, which enable adjacent peers to signal Class of Service Capabilities and certain Class of Service admission control Parameters. The new "CoS Capability Attribute" is deliberately kept simple and denotes the general EF, AF Group and BE forwarding support across the advertising AS. The second "CoS Parameter Attribute" is of variable length and contains a more detailed description of available forwarding behaviours using the PHB id Code encoding. Each PHB id Code is associated with rate and size based traffic parameters, which will be applied in the ingress AS Border Router for admission control purposes to a given forwarding behaviour. The denoted Class of Service forwarding support is meant as the AS externally available (transit) Class of Service support.

Some seven percent of children in the general population are affected by Specific Language Impairment and/or Pragmatic Language Impairment with numerous cases undiagnosed. It is known that difficulty in communication affects psychosocial functioning and is likely to be a source of mental distress but the data on people’s access to and benefit from psychological intervention are limited. There is also limited understanding of psychologists’ capacity to meet these clients’ needs although their problems continue into adulthood. This research questions the population of counselling and clinical psychologists about their knowledge and experience of these disorders using an electronic questionnaire. Qualitative methods were then adopted with three participants with SLI/PLI and four psychologist practitioners familiar with such clients; this involved semi-structured interviews analysed using IPA and TA respectively. The purpose was to interpret and develop the clients' lived experiences into themes which were then used to look for possible connecting themes in the psychologists’ transcripts. This process was termed "interconnection" and was intended to reveal the coincidence and convergence of the two sides of the client/psychologist dyad. Results showed that whereas findings demonstrated the young men possessed a spectrum of coping and defence strategies as constituent parts of resilience, including self-esteem, self-identity and self-efficacy, the psychologists did not see the client as a congruent whole, addressing either their impairment or their mental health problem. Client resiliencies were not used in therapy and psychosocial difficulties were not recognised as a focus of distress although they did endeavour to modify their therapeutic approaches. Finally, consideration is given to whether the research aim is met, the implications for counselling psychology and possible future research. It is proposed that this methodology of interconnection has the potential to provide a novel approach to inform any future research and service development for this and other client groups in the way it takes patients/clients into account and connects them with professional working.

Rapidly increasing transistor densities have led to the emergence of richly-integrated substrates in the form of chip multiprocessors and systems-on-a-chip. These devices integrate a variety of discrete resources, such as processing cores and cache memories, on a single die with the degree of integration growing in accordance with Moore's law. In this dissertation, we address challenges of scalability and quality-of-service (QOS) in network architectures of highly-integrated chips. The proposed techniques address the principal sources of inefficiency in networks-on-chip (NOCs) in the form of performance, area, and energy overheads. We also present a comprehensive network architecture capable of interconnecting over a thousand discrete resources with high efficiency and strong guarantees. We first show that mesh networks, commonly employed in existing chips, fall significantly short of achieving their performance potential due to transient congestion effects that diminish network performance. Adaptive routing has the potential to improve performance through better load distribution. However, we find that existing approaches are myopic in that they only consider local congestion indicators and fail to take global network state into account. Our approach, called Regional Congestion Awareness (RCA), improves network visibility in adaptive routers via a light-weight mechanism for propagating and integrating congestion information. By leveraging both local and non-local congestion indicators, RCA improves network load balance and boosts throughput. Under a set of parallel workloads running on a 49-node substrate, RCA reduces on-chip network latency by 16%, on average, compared to a locally-adaptive router. Next, we target NOC latency and energy efficiency through a novel point-to-multipoint topology. Ring and mesh networks, favored in existing on-chip interconnects, often require packets to go through a number of intermediate routers between source and destination nodes, resulting in significant latency and energy overheads. Topologies that improve connectivity, such as fat tree and flattened butterfly, eliminate much of the router overhead, but require non-minimal channel lengths or large channel count, reducing energy-efficiency and/or performance as a result. We propose a new topology, called Multidrop Express Channels (MECS), that augments minimally-routed express channels with multi-drop capability. The resulting richly-connected NOC enjoys a low hop count with favorable delay and energy characteristics, while improving wire utilization over prior proposals. Applications such as virtualized servers-on-a-chip and real-time systems require chip-level quality-of-service (QOS) support to provide fairness, service differentiation, and guarantees. Existing network QOS approaches suffer from considerable performance and area overheads that limit their usefulness in a resource-limited on-die network. In this dissertation, we propose a new QOS scheme called Preemptive Virtual Clock (PVC). PVC uses a preemptive approach to provide hard guarantees and strong performance isolation while dramatically reducing queuing requirements that burden prior proposals. Finally, we introduce a comprehensive network architecture that overcomes the bottlenecks of earlier designs with respect to area, energy, and QOS in future highly-integrated chips. The proposed NOC uses a topology-centric QOS approach that restricts the extent of hardware QOS support to a fraction of the network without compromising guarantees. In doing so, network area and energy efficiency are significantly improved. Further improvements are derived through a novel flow-control mechanism, along with switch- and link-level optimizations. In concert, these techniques yield a network capable of interconnecting over a thousand terminals on a die while consuming 47% less area and 26% less power than a state-of-the-art QOS-enabled NOC. The mechanisms proposed in this dissertation are synergistic and enable efficient, high-performance interconnects for future chips integrating hundreds or thousands of on-die resources. They address deficiencies in routing, topologies, and flow control of existing architectures with respect to area, energy, and performance scalability. They also serve as a building block for cost-effective advanced services, such as QOS guarantees at the die level. / text

We have demonstrated a flexible optical waveguide film with integrated VCSEL and PIN photodiode arrays for the fully embedded board level optical interconnection system. One of the most critical issues in the fully embedded board level optical interconnection system is the signal beam coupling between the guided-wave structure and the aperture of VCSEL (or PIN photodiode). The coupling efficiencies of spherical mirrors are calculated as a function of mirror radius. The optimum mirror radius ranges which are compatible with the fully embedded board level optical interconnection system are theoretically verified. The thermal characteristics of a thin film VCSEL are studied both theoretically and experimentally. The thermal resistances of VCSEL with variable thickness, ranging from 10 [mu]m to 200 [mu]m, have been determined by measuring the output wavelength shift as a function of the dissipated power. The thermal simulation results agree reasonably well with experimentally measured data. From the thermal management point of view, a thinned VCSEL has an exclusive advantage due to the reduction of the thermal resistance. The thermal resistance of 10 [mu]m thick VCSEL is 40 % lower than that of 200 [mu]m thick VCSEL. The theoretical analysis of thermal via effects is performed to determine optimized thickness ranges of thin film VCSEL for the fully embedded structure. Thermal resistance of the fully embedded thin film VCSEL with closed and open thermal via structures are also evaluated with the suitable VCSEL thickness reported. The high-performance computing system is demonstrated using a 16-channel optical backplane using thin film volume holographic gratings. The optical backplane contains TO-46-Can-packaged VCSELs and photodiodes as an optical transmitter and receiver, respectively. Optical packaging plates are fabricated for 4 X 8 array packaging for 16-VCSELs and 16-Photodiodes. Packaging issues including crosstalk and alignment tolerance are studied to design a low cost optical packaging scheme. Thin film volume hologram grating is fabricated on glass substrate to redirect light beams. An individual single channel performs at a 100 MHz data transfer rate. The high-performance computing system using 16-channel optical backplane is demonstrated at a 1.6 Gbps data transmission. / text

The formation of a continuous tubular network in the mammalian urinary system requires the interconnection of two epithelial populations with distinct cellular origins. The proximal component of the renal network is the nephron--a complex tubule responsible for much of the physiological action of the kidney. Nephrons connect to a collecting duct network to transport urine from the kidney to the bladder, via the ureter. I have used high-resolution image analysis of genetically labeled nephron and collecting duct networks together with apical and luminal markers to characterize the epithelial interconnection process in the developing kidney. Morphological protrusions at the distal end of the nephron precursor, adjacent to the tip of the collecting duct epithelium, precede luminal interconnection at the S-shaped body stage. Distal cells in the nephron precursor do not display clear epithelial junction complexes and show upregulation of phospho-myosin light chain, suggestive of a quasi-mesenchymal cell behavior. The close apposition of this group of cells with the collecting duct epithelium is facilitated by the absence on an intervening basal lamina. Live imaging of explanted kidneys suggests that distal cells break through into the lumen of the collecting duct epithelium and undergo cell death. No interconnection is observed upon Notch-mediated proximalization of distal cell fates. Furthermore, distal factor bone morphogenetic protein 2 (Bmp2) expression is lost in proximalized nephron precursor derivatives. Finally, I demonstrate that mice with specific loss of Bmp2 in nephron precursors and their derivatives results in a fraction of disconnected mature nephrons that later results in nephron atrophy and compromised renal function at juvenile stage compared to control mice. These data support a model in which the establishment of distal identity in nephron precursor cells closest to the nascent collecting duct epithelium leads to an active cell invasion that establishes a patent tubular interconnection between the nephron and collecting duct.

My project was to develop a hardware and software platform consisting of client nodes and a base station interconnected wirelessly. The nodes collect physical data for their local environment - I implemented a temperature measurement and a battery level reading. These measurements were placed in a packet which was then relayed via other nodes to the base station. The base station is attached to a USB dongle to a computer which collects the data and stores it into a log file for later analysis. In designing such a network, my goal was to learn about routing protocols, take key concepts learned in classes, such as different modulation schemes and the study of wireless degradation in various environments due to reflections and interference, and explore an implementation of a commercial wireless system. Such a system could be modified to fit a multitude of applications such as environmental data collection for farmers, low power networks for data communication for disaster recovery teams, or sensor networks or implemented in a house to collect data over long period and analyze variances in different regions and implement automated control through a feedback loop. To implement my code, I used TI’s EZ430-RF2500. This development kit contains the TI MSP430F2274, a 16MHz, 16 bit RISC processor which in active mode only pulls 270µA. The MSP430F2274 is coupled with a TI CC2500 which is a 2.4GHz RF transceiver used to communicate with the other devices. The EZ430-RF2500 connects to the computer via a USB dongle with proprietary firmware loaded which allows for programming and serial communication with the computer. I built a network using three devices; one connected to a laptop acting as the access point and two remote devices powered by two AAA batteries acting as the end devices or clients. I performed a study of packet success rates in different environments, specifically inside a residential home, outside in a residential neighborhood and in a rural area. In close ranges (distances less than 50’) there were no noticeable differences in performance between the three environments. I could not exceed 50’ inside the residential environment due to the size of the tested house. Beyond 50’ in the two outside environments, the results surprisingly did not differ greatly; successful transmissions were accomplished at distances only 10’ further in Town Lake; that is that successful transmissions were capable up to 95’ at Town Lake and 85’ in my uban neighborhood. As a representative finding, in the urban environment, the clients were successfully transmitting at an 80% success rate at 80’ pulling 84.48mW (26.4mA at 3.2V) while transmitting with 2-FSK. / text

A limited set of Processing Element (PE) pairs in a parallel computer cover the internal communications of scalable parallel programs. We take advantage of this property using the concept of Sparse Flat Neighborhood Networks (Sparse FNNs). Sparse FNNs are network designs that provide single-switch latency and full wire bandwidth for each specified PE pair, despite using relatively few network interfaces per PE and switches that have far fewer ports than there are PEs. This dissertation discusses the design problem, runtime support, and working prototype (KASY0) for Sparse FNNs. KASY0 not only demonstrated the claimed properties, but also set world records for its price/performance and performance on a specific application. Parallel supercomputers execute many portions of an application simultaneously. For scalable programs, the more PEs the system has, the greater the potential speedup. Portions executing on different PEs may be able to work independently for short periods, but the performance desired might not be achieved due to delays in communication between PEs. The set of PE pairs that will communicate often is both predictable and small relative to the number of possible PE pairings. This sparseness property can be exploited in the design and implementation of networks for massively parallel supercomputers. The sparseness of communicating pairs is rooted in the fact that each of the human-designed communication patterns commonly used in parallel programs has the property that the number of communicating pairs grows relatively slowly as the number of PEs is increased. Additionally, the number of pairs in the union of all communication patterns used in a suite of parallel programs grows surprisingly slowly due to pair synergy: the same pair often appears in multiple communication patterns. Detailed analysis of communication patterns clearly shows that the number of PE pairs actually communicating is very sparse, although the structure of the sparseness can be complex.

Det här examensarbetet har utförts på uppdrag åt Trollhättan Energi AB (TEAB). Examensarbetet är en utredning beträffande förutsättningar för sammankoppling av TEAB:s och Hjärtum Elförenings elnät. De nuvarande ledningsnäten har radialnät och det innebär att det endast har inmatning från ena ledningsänden. En sammankoppling skulle ge möjlighet till sektionerad drift vilket innebär inmatningsmöjligheter från båda ledningsändar. Det gör att ledningsnätet blir mer säkert, tillförlitligt och effektivt. Ett förslag på ett nytt ledningsnät där delar av TEAB:s och Hjärtum Elförenings ledningsnät är sammankopplade har tagits fram. Med det nya förslaget blir ledningsnätet mer driftsäkert och uppfyller lag- och myndighetskrav. Beräkningarna som ligger till grund för arbetet är teoretiskt utförda. Därför bör en fortsatt planering och undersökning inom ämnet utföras innan ledningsnäten sammankopplas. Budgetpriset för ombyggnationen i ledningsnätet har beräknats till cirka 700 000 kronor och investeringen anses nödvändig för att kunna utföra en sammankoppling utav elnäten. / This bachelor´s thesis is conducted on behalf of Trollhättan Energi AB (TEAB). The bachelor´s thesis is an investigation of conditions for interconnection of TEAB and Hjärtum Elförenings electrical grids. The current electrical grids are radial electrical grids and means that it can only be fed from one cable end. An interconnection would allow for sectional operation of the electrical grid. This means input opportunities from both cable ends and that the electrical grid becomes more safely, reliably and efficiently. Suggestion for new electrical grids which parts of TEAB and Hjärtum Elförenings electrical grids are interconnected has been developed. With the new suggestions becomes the electrical grid more reliable and complies with legal and regulatory requirements. The calculations that are underpinning the work is theoretical. Therefore, a continued planning and research in the subject should be performed before the electrical grids are interconnected. Budget price for the reconstruction of the electrical grids have been estimated to be about 700 000 SEK and the investment is considered essential for the interconnection.