Emerging technologies, like RPR, POS and GE, are being pushed to replace the traditional SONET/SDH and ATM in WAN. This paper evaluates performance issues of RPR, POS and GE on a testbed, including fault recovery, network stress, QoS and multicast behavior. Unlike other papers, which may have done performance investigations on a theoretical or simulation basis, all results presented in this paper are measured from a physical testbed network.

An incremental updating technique is developed for maintenance of the association rules discovered by database mining. There have been many studies on efficient discovery of association rules in large databases. However, it is nontrivial to maintain such discovered rules in large databases because a database may allow frequent or occasional updates and such updates may not only invalidate some existing strong association rules but also turn some weak rules into strong ones. An incremental updating technique is proposed for efficient maintenance of discovered association rules when new transaction data are added to a transaction database.