As the success of the Web increasingly brings us towards a fully connected world, home networking systems that connect and manage home appliances become the natural next step to complete the connectivity. Although there has been fast-growing interest in the design of smart appliances and environments, there has been little study on the dependability issues, which is essential to making home networking part of our daily lives. The heterogeneity of various in-home networks, the undependable nature of consumer devices, and the lack of knowledgeable system administrators in the home environment introduce both opportunities and challenges for dependability research. We report the dependability problems we encountered and the solutions we adopted in the deployment of the Aladdin home networking system. We propose the use of a soft-state store as a shared heartbeat infrastructure for monitoring the health of diverse hardware and software entities. We also describe a system architecture for connecting powerline devices to enhance dependability, and a monitoring tool for detecting unusual powerline activities potentially generated by intruders, interferences, or ill-behaved devices.

By means of optical transparency wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) networks with multi-rate transmissions are becoming a reality. The potential advantages of individually selecting the transmission rate for each lightpath are however not yet fully understood. A recent work studied for the first time multi-rate and multi-hop (M&M) networks in which tributary signals are transmitted over a concatenation of lightpaths, each one operating at its own transmission rate. The study revealed that the problem of designing M&M networks is NP-complete and optimal solutions are practically available only for small networks. The paper presents a heuristic algorithm for designing M&M ring networks that yields efficient sub-optimal solutions in polynomial time. The algorithm determines the rate for each lightpath taking into account a number of factors including the node's interface, amount of multiplexed traffic and cost of the network components. The potential advantages provided by the M&M network when compared to first generation optical networks (i.e., SONET/SDH), single- and multi-hop (constant bit rate) optical networks, are discussed in the paper and documented with numerical results. Presented results show that the network cost reduction achieved by the M&M design is a function of the cost ratio between the optical bandwidth (wavelengths) and the optical terminals.

The design of survivable all-optical networks based on self-healing WDM rings (SHR/WDM) to provide 100% protection from any single link failure requires the joint solution of three sub-problems. These are the ring cover of the mesh topology (the RC sub-problem), the routing of working lightpaths between node pairs to support traffic demands (the WL sub-problem) and the selection of the SHR/WDM spare wavelengths for the protection of every link traffic (the SW subproblem). This paper presents an integer linear programming (ILP) formulation of the problem of minimizing the total wavelength mileage (/spl lambda/-miles) required to support a set of given traffic demands in a given network topology using SHR/WDM employing 1:N line protection mechanism (the WRL problem). This formulation allows to jointly and optimally solve the three subproblems, and yields up to 15% reduction of the total /spl lambda/-miles required by existing solutions that separately resolve the sub-problems. A simplified sub-optimal solution of the WRL problem is also provided, that yields results few percent worse than the optimal solution and that is tractable for networks whose size is on the order of the pan-European network, i.e., 19 nodes.