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This article aims to investigate the performance of the IEEE 802.11-based tree-topology network, where a wireless node is within the others' carrier sensing ranges. In such a network, the concurrent transmission is a dominant cause of frame collisions. Moreover, the relay nodes (RN) (i.e., in the tree) likely cause the coexistence of non-saturated and saturated nodes in the networks. Those conditions have not been addressed in the previous works yet. As a solution, this work proposes new analytical expressions of delay and throughput in the investigated scenario. The presented analytical model incorporates the Bianchi model and airtime concept to formulate operations of the IEEE 802.11 nodes. First, by leveraging Bianchi-based analysis, the proposed model gives the frame collision probability caused by concurrent transmission. Second, by using airtime concept analysis, the ratio of frame numbers of each flow in a relay node (RN) is expressed to represent the buffer state of RN. As a result, we can obtain the network throughput, the throughput, and the delay of each flow. The validity of the analytical expressions is confirmed by the quantitative agreement between the analytical and simulation results.

This article proposes a scheme for selecting the best site for sink placement in WSN applications employing backbone assisted communications. By placing the sink at a specific position, energy scavenging and delay constraints can effectively be controlled. In contrast to the conventional scheme for base station placement at the geographical centre or random placement at the end of the region of interest, the proposed scheme places the base station at either the graph theoretical centre or centroid of the backbone connecting nodes in the region of interest. This strategy shows a considerable reduction in the total number of hops that each packet needs to travel to reach the sink. The proposed scheme is applied on all the families of graphs prevalent in backbone assisted sensor networks to confirm the performance consistency and improvement in network parameters of the communication backbone measured in terms of delay, the carried load and the total energy consumption, eventually affected by the average number of hops for the message to reach the sink.

The robustness of smart grids is challenged by unpredictable power peaks or temporal demand oscillations that can cause blackouts and increase supply costs. Planning of demand can mitigate these effects and increase robustness. However, the impact on consumers in regards to the discomfort they experience as a result of improving robustness is usually neglected. This paper introduces a decentralized agent-based approach that quantifies and manages the tradeoff between robustness and discomfort under demand planning. Eight selection functions of plans are experimentally evaluated using real data from two operational smart grids. These functions can provide different quality of service levels for demand-side energy self-management that capture both robustness and discomfort criteria.

Background The morphology of neurons offers many insights into developmental processes and signal processing. Numerous reports have focused on metrics at the level of individual branches or whole arbors; however, no studies have attempted to quantify repeated morphological patterns within neuronal trees. We introduce a novel sequential encoding of neurite branching suitable to explore topological patterns. Results Using all possible branching topologies for comparison we show that the relative abundance of short patterns of up to three bifurcations, together with overall tree size, effectively capture the local branching patterns of neurons. Dendrites and axons display broadly similar topological motifs (over-represented patterns) and anti-motifs (under-represented patterns), differing most in their proportions of bifurcations with one terminal branch and in select sub-sequences of three bifurcations. In addition, pyramidal apical dendrites reveal a distinct motif profile. Conclusions The quantitative characterization of topological motifs in neuronal arbors provides a thorough description of local features and detailed boundaries for growth mechanisms and hypothesized computational functions. Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s12859-015-0604-2) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

Several proximity measures have been proposed to compare classifications derived from different clustering algorithms. There are few proposed solutions for the comparison of two classification trees; some of them measure the difference between the structures of the trees, some other compare the partitions associated to the trees taking into account their predictive power. Their features and limitations have been discussed; furthermore, a new dissimilarity measure has been proposed. It considers both the aspects explored separately by the previous ones. Three measures have been compared analyzing two different classification problems: a real data set and a simulation study. With respect to the real data set it has also been evaluated how and how much each of the considered measures is influenced by the presence of highly predictive variables which are also highly correlated.

Large-scale decentralized systems organized in overlay networks are complex to manage. Such systems integrate organizational complexity in the application-level resulting in low abstraction and modularity in their services. This thesis introduces a multi-level conceptual architecture for overlay services. An overlay service is a large-scale decentralized system organized in overlay networks that provides generic application capabilities. Two overlay services introduced in this thesis provide a proof-of-concept for the higher abstraction and modularity that can be achieved with this architecture. The first overlay service builds and maintains overlay networks that are self-organized in different tree topologies according to different application criteria. The second overlay service performs a function-indepencent and routing-independent decentralized aggregation of values that are distributed in a network and continuously changing. Experimental evaluation studies the performance trade-offs imposed by this generic design. This thesis studies overlay services in the application domain of the Smart Power Grid. More specifically, overlay services are used in demand-side energy management to perform (i) load-shifting and (ii) demand-adjustment in a fully decentralized fashion. The evaluation of this approach is grounded in the current reality and practice of the Smart Power Grid.

We envisage a wireless sensor network (WSN) where each node is tasked with estimating a set of node-specific desired signals that has been corrupted by additive noise. The nodes accomplish this estimation by means of the distributed adaptive node-specific estimation (DANSE) algorithm in a tree topology (T-DANSE). In this paper, we consider a network where there is at least one node with a large (virtually infinite) energy budget, which we select as the root node. We propose a modification to the signal flow of the T-DANSE algorithm where instead of each node having two-way signal communication, there is a single signal flow toward the root node of the tree topology which then broadcasts a single signal to all other nodes. We demonstrate that the modified algorithm is equivalent to the original T-DANSE algorithm in terms of the signal estimation performance, shifts a large part of the communication burden toward the high-power root node to reduce the energy consumption in the low-power nodes and reduces the input-output delay.

This paper provides a performance evaluation of tree and mesh routing topologies of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) in a cultural heritage site. The historical site selected was San Juan Bautista church in Talamanca de Jarama (Madrid, Spain). We report the preliminary analysis required to study the effects of heating in this historical location using WSNs to monitor the temperature and humidity conditions during periods of weeks. To test which routing topology was better for this kind of application, the WSNs were first deployed on the upper floor of the CAEND institute in Arganda del Rey simulating the church deployment, but in the former scenario there was no direct line of sight between the WSN elements. Two parameters were selected to evaluate the performance of the routing topologies of WSNs: the percentage of received messages and the lifetime of the wireless sensor network. To analyze in more detail which topology gave the best performance, other communication parameters were also measured. The tree topology used was the collection tree protocol and the mesh topology was the XMESH provided by MEMSIC (Andover, MA, USA). For the scenarios presented in this paper, it can be concluded that the tree topology lost fewer messages than the mesh topology., The Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness supported this research under grant numbers BIA2009-14395-C04-01 and TEC2012-38402-C04-03. The present study was also funded under project CGL2010-19554. S. Aparicio benefited from funding provided by the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) through its Post-graduate Studies Council’s post-doctoral specialisation programme (JAE-Doc). Researcher Martínez-Garrido’s was supported by an International Programme for Recruiting Talent (PICATA) predoctoral fellowship awarded by the Moncloa Campus of International Excellence (UPM-UCM, CSIC). J. Ranz benefited from a FPI grant BES-2010-038826 of the Ministry of Education, Culture and Sports. We acknowledge support by the CSIC Open Access Publication Initiative through its Unit of Information Resources for Research (URICI)

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are formed by a large collection of power-conscious wireless-capable sensors without the support of pre-existing infrastructure, possibly by unplanned deployment. With a sheer number of sensor nodes, their unattended deployment and hostile environment very often preclude reliance on physical configuration or physical topology. It is, therefore, often necessary to depend on the logical topology. Logical topologies govern how a sensor node communicates with other nodes in the network. In this way, logical topologies play a vital role for resource-constraint sensor networks. It is thus more intuitive to approach the constraint minimizing problems from (logical) topological point of view. Hence, this paper aims to study the logical topologies of WSNs. In doing so, a set of performance metrics is identified first. We identify various logical topologies from different application protocols of WSNs, and then compare the topologies using the set of performance metrics.

Background Polyploidization is an important mechanism in plant evolution. By analyzing the leaf transcriptomes taken from the allotetraploid Nicotiana tabacum (tobacco) and parental genome donors, N. sylvesteris (S-Genome) and N. tomentosiformis (T-Genome), a phylogenomic approach was taken to map the fate of homeologous gene pairs in this plant. Results A comparison between the genes present in the leaf transcriptomes of N. tabacum and modern day representatives of its progenitor species demonstrated that only 33% of assembled transcripts could be distinguished based on their sequences. A large majority of the genes (83.6% of the non parent distinguishable and 87.2% of the phylogenetic topology analyzed clusters) expressed above background level (more than 5 reads) showed similar overall expression levels. Homeologous sequences could be identified for 968 gene clusters, and 90% (6% of all genes) of the set maintained expression of only one of the tobacco homeologs. When both homeologs were expressed, only 15% (0.5% of the total) showed evidence of differential expression, providing limited evidence of subfunctionalization. Comparing the rate of synonymous nucleotide substitution (Ks) and non-synonymous nucleotide substitution (Kn) provided limited evidence for positive selection during the evolution of tobacco since the polyploidization event took place. Conclusions Polyploidization is a powerful mechanism for plant speciation that can occur during one generation; however millions of generations may be necessary for duplicate genes to acquire a new function. Analysis of the tobacco leaf transcriptome reveals that polyploidization, even in a young tetraploid such as tobacco, can lead to complex changes in gene expression. Gene loss and gene silencing, or subfunctionalization may explain why both homeologs are not expressed by the associated genes. With Whole Genome Duplication (WGD) events, polyploid genomes usually maintain a high percentage of gene duplicates. The data provided little evidence of preferential maintenance of gene expression from either the T- or S-genome. Additionally there was little evidence of neofunctionalization in Nicotiana tabacum suggesting it occurs at a low frequency in young polyploidy.

In hot-potato (deflection) routing, nodes in the network have no buffers for packets in transit, which causes conflicting packets to be deflected away from their destinations. We study one-to-many batch routing problems on arbitrary tree topologies. We present two hot-potato routing algorithms, one deterministic and one randomized, whose routing times are asymptotically near-optimal (within poly-logarithmic factors from optimal). Both algorithms are distributed and greedy so, routing decisions are made locally, and packets are advanced towards their destinations whenever possible. © Springer-Verlag 2004. 3149 820 827 Cited By :5

This paper reports on the simulation results of a heuristic solution to the station allocation problem in a tree topology Local Area Network (LAN). A local network is a data communication network where communication remains confined within a moderate sized area, such as a plant site, an office building or a university campus. Tree LANs with collision avoidance switches and multiple broadcast facility have, recently, become popular due to their suitability for high speed light wave communications. Given a tree LAN with fanout F and given the total number of stations N to be connected, a combinatorial optimization problem arises regarding how to allocate the stations to the leaf nodes so that the total system availability (a network performance criteria) is maximized. This is known as the optimal station assignment problem. In this paper, it is formulated as a non-linear optimization problem which can be solved by the Lagrangean relaxation and the subgradient optimization techniques. A simple heuristic is developed based on these techniques. The simulation studies show that the proposed heuristic is relatively fast operating only in a subspace of the complete solution space.