Search for: All records

Waves of miseryis a phenomenon where spikes of many node splits occur over short periods of time in tree indexes. Waves of misery negatively affect the performance of tree indexes in insertion-heavy workloads. Waves of misery have been first observed in the context of the B-tree, where these waves cause unpredictable index performance. In particular, the performance of search and index-update operations deteriorate when a wave of misery takes place, but is more predictable between the waves. This paper investigates the presence or lack of waves of misery in several R-tree variants, and studies the extent of which these waves impact the performance of each variant. Interestingly, although having poorer query performance, the Linear and Quadratic R-trees are found to be more resilient to waves of misery than both the Hilbert and R*-trees. This paper presents several techniques to reduce the impact in performance of the waves of misery for the Hilbert and R*-trees. One way to eliminate waves of misery is to force node splits to take place at regular times before nodes become full to achieve deterministic performance. The other way is that upon splitting a node, do not split it evenly but rather at different node utilization factors. This allows leaf nodes not to fill at the same pace. We study the impact of two new techniques to mitigate waves of misery after the tree index has been constructed, namely Regular Elective Splits (RES, for short) and Unequal Random Splits (URS, for short). Our experimental investigation highlights the trade-offs in performance of the introduced techniques and the pros and cons of each technique. 

For improved spectrum utilization, the key technique for acquiring spectrum situational awareness (SSA) — spectrum sensing — is greatly improved by cooperation among the active spectrum users, as network size increases. However, the many cooperative spectrum sensing (CSS) schemes that have been proposed are based on the assumptions of accurate noise power estimates, characterizable variation in noise level and absence of false or malicious users. As part of a series of SSA research projects, in this research work, we propose a novel scheme for minimizing the effects of noise power estimation error (NPEE) and received signal power falsification (RSPF) by energy-based reliability evaluation. The scheme adopts the Voting rule for fusing multiple spectrum sensing data. Based on simulation results, the proposed scheme yields significant improvement, 68.2—88.8%, over the conventional CSS schemes, when compared on the basis of the schemes’ stability to uncertainties in noise and signal power.