The LHCb experiment is dedicated to precision measurements of CP violation and rare decays of B hadrons at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN (Geneva). The initial configuration and expected performance of the detector and associated systems, as established by test beam measurements and simulation studies, is described.

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In Software Defined Networking (SDN), the controller locations are mainly constrained by delays between switches and controllers, and between the controllers themselves. In addition to the delay requirements, the availability of the connections between switches and controllers is also a key issue for control plane performance.Here, we explore the idea of having a spanning tree substructure called the spine, * This work was partially supported by Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT) under project grant UIDB/00308/2020 and was financially supported by FEDER Funds and National Funds through FCT under project CENTRO-01-0145-FEDER-029312.

Consider a geographical network with associated link costs. In anycast routing, network nodes are partitioned into two sets-the source nodes and the anycast (destination) nodes-and the traffic of each source node is routed towards the anycast node providing the minimum routing cost path. By considering a given geographical distance parameter D, we define an anycast routing solution as D-geodiverse when for each source node there are two routing paths, each one towards a different anycast node, such that the geographical distance between the two paths is at least D. Such a solution has the property that any disaster with a coverage diameter below D affecting one routing path (but without involving neither the source node nor its entire set of outgoing links) cannot affect the other path, enhancing in this way the network robustness to natural disasters. The selection of the anycast nodes has an impact both on the feasibility and cost of a Dgeodiverse anycast routing solution. Therefore, for a desired number of anycast nodes R, we define the minimum cost Dgeodiverse anycast problem (MCD-GAP) aiming to identify a set of R anycast nodes that obtain a minimum cost routing solution. The problem is defined based on integer linear programming and is extended to consider the existence of vulnerability regions in the network, i.e., by imposing the geographical distance D only between network elements belonging to the same region. We present computational results showing the tradeoff between D and R in the optimal solutions obtained with and without vulnerability regions.

We overview and discuss several methods for the Fourier analysis of symbolic data, such as DNA sequences, emphasizing their mutual connections. We consider the indicator sequence approach, the vector and the symbolic autocorrelation methods, and methods such as the spectral envelope, that for each frequency optimize the symbolic-no-numeric mapping to emphasize any periodic data features. We discuss the equivalence or connections between these methods. We show that it is possible to define the autocorrelation function of symbolic data, assuming only that we can compare any two symbols and decide if they are equal or distinct. The autocorrelation is a numeric sequence, and its Fourier transform can also be obtained by summing the squares of the Fourier transform of indicator sequences (zero/one sequences indicating the position of the symbols). Another interpretation of the spectrum is given, borrowing from the spectral envelope concept: among all symbolic-to-numeric mappings there is one that maximizes the spectral energy at each frequency, and leads to the spectrum.  2004 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

In telecommunication networks based on the current Ethernet technology, routing of traffic demands is based on multiple spanning trees: the network operator configures different routing spanning trees and assigns each demand to be routed in one of the selected spanning trees. A major optimization issue in this solution is the combined determination of (i) a set of appropriate spanning trees, and (ii) assignment of demands to the trees, in order to achieve an optimal load balancing on the links of the network. In this paper we consider models and solving techniques for lexicographical optimization of two load balancing objective functions. The first objective is the min-max optimization of the n worst link loads (with n up to the total number of network links), and the second objective is the minimization of the average link load (when n is smaller than the total number of network links). Besides exact methods, a heuristic technique that can compute both feasible solutions and lower bounds for the addressed optimization problem is proposed. Finally, we discuss effectiveness of different solution using results of a numerical study of realistic case studies.

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The problem of guaranteeing 'five-nines' availability between the controllers in a SDN network is addressed. We consider the problem of controller placement under delay constraints, while assuming a sub-graph of enhanced availability between the controllers. The sub-graph can be upgraded at a given cost, to achieve the desired availability requirements. To solve this problem, we propose a heuristic method to evaluate several controller node sets and the upgrade cost of the subgraph for enhanced availability. The computational results show that slightly increasing the number of controllers can lead to a significant reduction in the upgrade cost.