The global telephony infrastructure is rapidly evolving from circuit-switching to IP-based packet-switching. Voice over IP (VoIP) is becoming common and is the intended base technology for corporate giants such as AT&T and Qwest. The marketing research firm, IDC, states “IP telephony is poised to become the fastest-growing, network services market of the decade” [1]. Reference [2] reviews the m...

Consensus is an important building block for building replicated systems, and many consensus protocols have been proposed. In this paper, we investigate the building blocks of consensus protocols and use these building blocks to assemble a skeleton that can be configured to produce, among others, three well-known consensus protocols: Paxos, Chandra-Toueg, and Ben-Or. Although each of these prot...

This paper is concerned with examining the way in which rooted building blocks grow in GP-like systems. We hypothesize that, in addition to the normal notion of co-operative building blocks, there are also competitive building blocks in the population. These competitive building blocks are all of the rooted variety, all share a similar root structure and compete with each other to spread their ...

In the light of a recently derived evolution equation for genetic algorithms we consider the schema theorem and the building block hypothesis. We derive a schema theorem based on the concept of effective fitness showing that schemata of higher than average effective fitness receive an exponentially increasing number of trials over time. The equation makes manifest the content of the building bl...

Rational and generalisable methods for engineering surface functionality will be crucial to realising the technological potential of nanomaterials. Nanoparticle-bound dynamic covalent exchange combines the error-correcting and environment-responsive features of equilibrium processes with the stability, structural precision, and vast diversity of covalent chemistry, defining a new and powerful a...

Many modern networks grow from blocks. We study the probabilistic behavior of parameters of a blocks tree, which models several kinds of networks. It grows from building blocks that are themselves rooted trees. We investigate the number of leaves, depth of nodes, total path length, and height of such trees. We use methods from the theory of Pólya urns and martingales.

This paper describes three building blocks of a technological Knowledge Management (KM) system that provides all relevant and practical means of supporting KM and thus differentiates itself from existing KM tools in goal and approach, as they usually deal with a limited range only. The three blocks described within this paper are: a virtual information pool, which utilizes Enterprise Applicatio...

This document discusses the creation of negative-acknowledgment (NACK)-oriented reliable multicast (NORM) protocols. The rationale for NORM goals and assumptions are presented. Technical challenges for NACK-oriented (and in some cases general) reliable multicast protocol operation are identified. These goals and challenges are resolved into a set of functional "building blocks" that address dif...

ions for combined specification of languages and IDEs Modern IDEs support well over a dozen distinct, language-specific syntactic and semantic editor services. These range from services that rely purely on the lexical syntax of the language, such as automatic comment insertion, to those relying on the context-free syntax, such as syntax highlighting and code folding, to deeply semantic services...