How can energy from renewable sources be integrated in large quantities into the power supply without overwhelming the grid? A collaboration between BKW, the electric utility in the Canton of Bern, IBM, Migros, Switzerland's largest retailer and supermarket chain, and Swissgrid, the national grid operator is creating a unique solution that applies advanced algorithms to data on the state of the grid and large freezer warehouses to optimize and manage the consumption of power for cooling to help balance the grid. In this paper we describe the architecture of the system and examine the business case required to make this approach feasible.

The multiprotocol transport networking (MPTN) architecture proposed in this paper is a general solution to providing interconnectivity for applications. The MPTN architecture provides a protocol-independent system interface that includes most functions provided by existing transport protocols. As a result, the MPTN architecture decouples higher-layer protocols, application programming interfaces, and applications from protocols at the transport layer and below. Using the MPTN architecture, current and new applications can function unmodified over any transport supported under the MPTN interface. In addition, MPTN transport-layer gateways provide an end-to-end communication facility across a number of networks running different protocols. Therefore, a collection of networks running different protocols can serve as a single logical network.>

A hierarchical decomposition of network nodes which permits the networkwide topology database and algorithms to be independent of node internals, yet allows (implicit) access to special intranodal features when required is described. A complementary procedure for the establishment of bandwidth-reserved connections is outlined that makes efficient use of this node structure to support network-level optimization through use of node-level features. Based on a significantly increased concurrency of path computation and bandwidth reservation, the execution time of the setup procedure is independent of the network's complexity (such as number of nodes and links) and is essentially bounded from above by the round-trip delay only.>

A comparative survey is presented of techniques used at the transport layer in eight representative protocols, most of which were designed to improve the protocol processing rate. The protocols are the relevant portions of the APPN, Datakit, Delta-t, NETBLT, OSI/TP4, TCP, VMTP, and XTP architectures. The protocols are described, and the functions under consideration are defined. No distinction is made as to whether these functions are carried out in a LAN, MAN, or WAN environment. The objective is to provide reliable, end-to-end transmission of data. The mechanisms required to support connection management, acknowledgements, flow control, and error handling are examined. Suitable techniques for designing light-weight transport protocols are identified. A discussion is presented as to which technique seems the most promising.>

The fiber distributed data interface (FDDI) provides a 100 Mb/s communication system to interconnect computer and peripheral equipment using fiber optics as the transmission medium in a ring configuration. The performance of the FDDI media-access control (MAC) protocol, a timed-token protocol, is analyzed. The FDDI MAC priority mechanism supports two classes of traffic: synchronous and asynchronous. The focus is on the relationship between the FDDI MAC parameter settings, the ring configuration, and the performance of the asynchronous priority levels. A procedure to calculate estimates for the throughput of each asynchronous priority level over a range of frame-arrival rates is developed. Performance results are presented to demonstrate characteristics of the FDDI priority mechanism. A procedure is described that can be used to tune the FDDI parameters so that given performance objectives for the various priority levels are achieved.>