With the growing complexity of data acquisition and processing methods, there is an increasing demand in understanding which data is outdated and how to have it as fresh as possible. Staleness is one of the key, time-related, data quality characteristics, that represents a degree of synchronization between data originators and information systems possessing the data. However, nowadays there is ...

A popular technique to improve the scalability of a web based system is caching at proxy servers. Caching has the drawback that a cached page becomes stale when the page is updated at the web server. In some cases, staleness may not be completely avoided because the server may not wish to expend the processing and communication resources required to transmit all the updates immediately. In gene...

In recent years, various MAC (Medium Access Control) protocols using directional antennas have been proposed for ad hoc networks including our proposed MAC protocol called SWAMP (Smart antennas based Wider-range Access MAC Protocol). These are typically referred to as directional MAC protocols. This paper first summarizes the proposed directional MAC protocols and points out these common issues...

In recent years, several MAC (Medium Access Control) protocols using directional antennas have been proposed for mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) including our proposed MAC protocol called SWAMP (Smart antennas based Wider-range Access MAC Protocol). These are typically referred to as directional MAC protocols. This paper first summarizes the proposed directional MAC protocols and outlines these...

Modern storage systems employing quorum replication are often configured to use partial, non-strict quorums. These systems wait only for a subset of their replicas to respond to a request before returning an answer, without guaranteeing that read and write replica sets intersect. While these partial quorum mechanisms provide only basic eventual consistency guarantees, with no limit to the recen...

A recent paper on benchmarking eventual consistency showed that when a constant workload is applied against Cassandra, the staleness of values returned by read operations exhibits interesting but unexplained variations when plotted against time. In this paper we reproduce this phenomenon and investigate in greater depth the low-level mechanisms that give rise to stale reads. We show that the st...