Subset Of Nodes Research Articles

A quinazoline derivative suppresses B cell hyper-activation and ameliorates the severity of systemic lupus erythematosus in mice.

Background: Aberrant autoreactive B cell responses contribute to the pathogenesis of systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE). Currently, there is no safe and effective drug for intervention of SLE. Quinazoline derivative (N4-(4-phenoxyphenethyl)quinazoline-4,6-diamine, QNZ) is a NF-κB inhibitor and has potent anti-inflammatory activity. However, it is unclear whether QNZ treatment can modulate B cell activation and SLE severity. Methods: Splenic CD19+ B cells were treated with QNZ (2, 10, or 50nM) or paeoniflorin (200μM, a positive control), and their activation and antigen presentation function-related molecule expression were examined by flow cytometry. MRL/lpr lupus-prone mice were randomized and treated intraperitoneally with vehicle alone, 0.2mg/kg/d QNZ or 1mg/kg/d FK-506 (tacrolimus, a positive control) for 8weeks. Their body weights and clinical symptoms were measured and the frequency of different subsets of splenic and lymph node activated B cells were quantified by flow cytometry. The degrees of kidney inflammation and glycogen deposition were examined by hematoxylin and eosin (H&E) and PAS staining. The levels of serum autoantibodies and renal IgG, complement C3 deposition were examined by ELISA and immunofluorescence. Results: QNZ treatment significantly inhibited the activation and antigen presentation-related molecule expression of B cells in vitro. Similarly, treatment with QNZ significantly mitigated the SLE activity by reducing the frequency of activated B cells and plasma cells in MRL/lpr mice. Conclusion: QNZ treatment ameliorated the severity of SLE in MRL/lpr mice, which may be associated with inhibiting B cell activation, and plasma cell formation. QNZ may be an excellent candidate for the treatment of SLE and other autoimmune diseases.

Weak Stabilization of Boolean Networks Under State-Flipped Control.

In this brief, stabilization of Boolean networks (BNs) by flipping a subset of nodes is considered, here we call such action state-flipped control. The state-flipped control implies that the logical variables of certain nodes are flipped from 1 to 0 or 0 to 1 as time flows. Under state-flipped control on certain nodes, a state-flipped-transition matrix is defined to describe the impact on the state transition space. Weak stabilization is first defined and then some criteria are presented to judge the same. An algorithm is proposed to find a stabilizing kernel such that BNs can achieve weak stabilization to the desired state with in-degree more than 0. By defining a reachable set, another approach is proposed to verify weak stabilization, and an algorithm is given to obtain a flip sequence steering an initial state to a given target state. Subsequently, the issue of finding flip sequences to steer BNs from weak stabilization to global stabilization is addressed. In addition, a model-free reinforcement algorithm, namely the Q -learning ( [Formula: see text]) algorithm, is developed to find flip sequences to achieve global stabilization. Finally, several numerical examples are given to illustrate the obtained theoretical results.

Spectral top-down recovery of latent tree models.

Modeling the distribution of high-dimensional data by a latent tree graphical model is a prevalent approach in multiple scientific domains. A common task is to infer the underlying tree structure, given only observations of its terminal nodes. Many algorithms for tree recovery are computationally intensive, which limits their applicability to trees of moderate size. For large trees, a common approach, termed divide-and-conquer, is to recover the tree structure in two steps. First, separately recover the structure of multiple, possibly random subsets of the terminal nodes. Second, merge the resulting subtrees to form a full tree. Here, we develop spectral top-down recovery (STDR), a deterministic divide-and-conquer approach to infer large latent tree models. Unlike previous methods, STDR partitions the terminal nodes in a non random way, based on the Fiedler vector of a suitable Laplacian matrix related to the observed nodes. We prove that under certain conditions, this partitioning is consistent with the tree structure. This, in turn, leads to a significantly simpler merging procedure of the small subtrees. We prove that STDR is statistically consistent and bound the number of samples required to accurately recover the tree with high probability. Using simulated data from several common tree models in phylogenetics, we demonstrate that STDR has a significant advantage in terms of runtime, with improved or similar accuracy.

Aligning distant sequences to graphs using long seed sketches.

Sequence-to-graph alignment is crucial for applications such as variant genotyping, read error correction, and genome assembly. We propose a novel seeding approach that relies on long inexact matches rather than short exact matches, and show that it yields a better time-accuracy trade-off in settings with up to a [Formula: see text] mutation rate. We use sketches of a subset of graph nodes, which are more robust to indels, and store them in a k-nearest neighbor index to avoid the curse of dimensionality. Our approach contrasts with existing methods and highlights the important role that sketching into vector space can play in bioinformatics applications. We show that our method scales to graphs with 1 billion nodes and has quasi-logarithmic query time for queries with an edit distance of [Formula: see text] For such queries, longer sketch-based seeds yield a [Formula: see text] increase in recall compared with exact seeds. Our approach can be incorporated into other aligners, providing a novel direction for sequence-to-graph alignment.

Imprecise covering ring star problem

In this paper, we formulate and solve an Imprecise Covering Ring Star Problem (ICRSP), which is a generalization of the Ring Star Problem (RSP). Here the objective of this problem is to find a subset of nodes in a network to minimize the sum of routing costs of interconnecting cycle and assignment costs of the nodes which are out of cycle, to their nearest concentrators such that no assigned node exceeds a predetermined distance (say, covering distance) from the concentrators. The covering distance, as well as the routing and assignments costs, are considered as fuzzy in the proposed ICRSP. A Modified Genetic Algorithm (MGA) is developed and used to solve this model for different confidence levels depending on the corresponding imprecise parameters, reducing it to deterministic form with fuzzy possibility and necessity approaches. Some comparisons with existing benchmark problems are made to justify the performance of the algorithm. As individual cases, some practical ICRSPs are also solved and presented numerically.

A Multi-Objective Virtual Network Migration Algorithm Based on Reinforcement Learning

Virtual network migration (VNM) helps improve network performance by remapping a subset of virtual nodes or links to physical infrastructure, aligning the resource allocation to the virtual network&#x0027;s changing conditions. However, existing VNM methods neglect integrating multiple objectives that affect network performance, such as energy, communication, migration, and service level agreement violation (SLAV). It is challenging to make VNM decisions to optimize the overall objective in a large-scale cloud environment. This article establishes a multi-objective optimization model and proposes a multi-objective VNM algorithm called MiOvnm. The MiOvnm employs the double deep <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX"><?TeX $Q$?></tex-math></inline-formula>-learning approach to cope with ample state space. It also applies an action selection method called actfilter to deal with large-scale action space. The MiOvnm finds the migration action with optimal potential reward from the candidate action set. Simulation results demonstrate the superiority of our MiOvnm to the state-of-the-art methods. More specifically, MiOvnm reduces average SLAV, communication cost, and total cost by 24.32&#x0025;, 4.95&#x0025;, and 12.45&#x0025;, respectively. Furthermore, evaluation results in a real-world OpenStack platform reveal that making full use of computation and network resources, the MiOvnm reduces the completion time of computation- and network-intensive benchmarks by 11.35&#x0025; and 10.31&#x0025;, respectively, with a total cost reduction of 26.02&#x0025;.

Generalized network dismantling via a novel spectral partition algorithm

Network dismantling problem aims to find a node subset whose removal from a network results in the fragmentation of the network into subcritical connected components at the minimal overall cost. People have always been more interested in the unweighted case where each node has the same cost, while there are few results for the weighted case when nodes have different costs. It is a much more challenging problem in network science. In this paper, we present a novel strategy for this generalized network dismantling problem by characterizing the relationship between blocks and cut nodes. We firstly construct an auxiliary block-cut tree T from the original network G, where the nodes in the tree T have two types which correspond to either blocks or cut nodes of G, and edges of T only exist between two different type of nodes. Then we transform the problem of partitioning G by removing nodes to the problem of partitioning T by removing edges, both at a minimum overall cost. Finally partitioning T can be solved by a weighted spectral clustering algorithm. When we apply this new strategy on real-world networks, it performs equally or even better than the current state-of-the-art methods.

On optimally solving sub‐tree scheduling for wireless sensor networks with partial coverage: A branch‐and‐cut algorithm

AbstractGiven a wireless sensor network, we consider the problem to minimize its total energy consumption over consecutive time slots with respect to communication activities. Nonempty and disjoint subsets of nodes are required to be active and connected under a tree topology configuration in the different time slots, and each network node must be active in a unique time slot. Moreover, the power required by the same pair of network nodes to communicate on the associated direct channel may vary in the different time slots. The problem has been recently introduced in the literature under the name Sub‐Tree Scheduling for Wireless Sensor Networks with Partial Coverage. We focus on the exact solution of the problem. We present a branch‐and‐cut (BC) algorithm based on a novel integer linear programming formulation which allows avoiding the introduction of symmetries in the solution space. In particular, the algorithm relies on an efficient and nontypical separation algorithm for known valid inequalities, and on an easy‐to‐implement primal bound heuristic. The effectiveness of the BC algorithm is empirically shown through an extensive experimental analysis involving 300 newly generated benchmark instances with up to 200 network nodes and 8 time slots. Additionally, the experimental results show that the BC algorithm represents a valid computational tool to benchmark the performance of heuristics addressing the problem, and can be used in practice, as an heuristic solver, to tackle problem instances that are not too large.

Early warnings for multi-stage transitions in dynamics on networks.

Successfully anticipating sudden major changes in complex systems is a practical concern. Such complex systems often form a heterogeneous network, which may show multi-stage transitions in which some nodes experience a regime shift earlier than others as an environment gradually changes. Here we investigate early warning signals for networked systems undergoing a multi-stage transition. We found that knowledge of both the ongoing multi-stage transition and network structure enables us to calculate effective early warning signals for multi-stage transitions. Furthermore, we found that small subsets of nodes could anticipate transitions as well as or even better than using all the nodes. Even if we fix the network and dynamical system, no single best subset of nodes provides good early warning signals, and a good choice of sentinel nodes depends on the tipping direction and the current stage of the dynamics within a multi-stage transition, which we systematically characterize.

Low Latency Allcast Over Broadcast Erasure Channels

Consider <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$n$ </tex-math></inline-formula> nodes communicating over an unreliable broadcast channel. Each node has a single packet that needs to be communicated to all other nodes. Time is slotted, and a time slot is long enough for each node to broadcast one packet. Each broadcast reaches a random subset of nodes. The objective is to minimise the time until all nodes have received all packets. We study two schemes, (i) random relaying, and (ii) random linear network coding, and analyse their performance in an asymptotic regime in which <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$n$ </tex-math></inline-formula> tends to infinity. Simulation results for a wide range of <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$n$ </tex-math></inline-formula> are also presented.

SDN-enabled Resource Provisioning Framework for Geo-Distributed Streaming Analytics

Geographically distributed (geo-distributed) datacenters for stream data processing typically comprise multiple edges and core datacenters connected through Wide-Area Network (WAN) with a master node responsible for allocating tasks to worker nodes. Since WAN links significantly impact the performance of distributed task execution, the existing task assignment approach is unsuitable for distributed stream data processing with low latency and high throughput demand. In this paper, we propose SAFA, a resource provisioning framework using the Software-Defined Networking (SDN) concept with an SDN controller responsible for monitoring the WAN, selecting an appropriate subset of worker nodes, and assigning tasks to the designated worker nodes. We implemented the data plane of the framework in P4 and the control plane components in Python. We tested the performance of the proposed system on Apache Spark, Apache Storm, and Apache Flink using the Yahoo! streaming benchmark on a set of custom topologies. The results of the experiments validate that the proposed approach is viable for distributed stream processing and confirm that it can improve at least 1.64× the processing time of incoming events of the current stream processing systems.

Effective stabilized self-training on few-labeled graph data

Graph neural networks (GNNs) are designed for semi-supervised node classification on graphs where only a subset of nodes have class labels. However, under extreme cases when very few labels are available (e.g., 1 labeled node per class), GNNs suffer from severe performance degradation. Specifically, we observe that existing GNNs suffer from unstable training process on few-labeled graphs, resulting to inferior performance on node classification. Therefore, we propose an effective framework, Stabilized Self-Training (SST), which is applicable to existing GNNs to handle the scarcity of labeled data, and consequently, boost classification accuracy. We conduct thorough empirical and theoretical analysis to support our findings and motivate the algorithmic designs in SST. We apply SST to two popular GNN models GCN and DAGNN, to get SSTGCN and SSTDA methods respectively, and evaluate the two methods against 10 competitors over 5 benchmarking datasets. Extensive experiments show that the proposed SST framework is highly effective, especially when few labeled data are available. Our methods achieve superior performance under almost all settings over all datasets. For instance, on a Cora dataset with only 1 labeled node per class, the accuracy of SSTGCN is 62.5%, 17.9% higher than GCN, and the accuracy of SSTDA is 66.4%, which outperforms DAGNN by 6.6%.

A parallel adaptive memory algorithm for the capacitated modular hub location problem

The capacitated modular hub location problem is a realistic variant of the popular hub location problem arising from the design of telecommunications networks. Given a set of demand nodes, the problem consists in selecting a subset of nodes to represent hubs and assigning the rest of the nodes to the hub nodes, such that the transportation cost is minimized while satisfying the capacity constraints. The adaptive memory algorithm is a hybrid evolutionary heuristic that uses a central memory to store blocks of solutions. At each iteration, the recombination operator uses these solution blocks to create an offspring solution. In this paper, we present a parallel adaptive memory algorithm for the capacitated modular hub location problem that stores both solution blocks and complete solutions in a shared memory for the creation of an offspring. Other distinguishing features of our proposed algorithm include specially designed recombination and mutation operators for search diversification, an effective tabu search procedure for search intensification, and parallel computing for global optimization. Extensive computational results on three well-known data sets of 170 benchmark instances show that the proposed algorithm competes very favorably with the state-of-the-art heuristics from the literature. In particular, it finds 115 improved best-known solutions (for more than 67% of the cases). Furthermore, we analyze the key algorithmic components and shed lights on their impact on the proposed algorithm.

On Complete Targets Coverage in Rechargeable IoT Networks: A Message-Passing Approach

This article studies targets coverage in an energy harvesting (EH) Internet of Things (IoT) network. Specifically, it addresses the problem of activating subsets of EH sensor nodes to monitor targets, such as valuable assets or the ingresses and egresses of a building. A key requirement, so called complete targets coverage, is that all targets must be monitored by at least one sensor node at all times. To meet this requirement, we need to derive set covers, where each set cover is comprised of one or more sensor nodes that are activated simultaneously in each time slot. To this end, we show for the first time how the belief propagation message-passing framework can be used to derive these set covers. Advantageously, our approach does not require future energy arrivals information at devices. The results show that our message-passing approach is within 90% of the optimal coverage lifetime.

Query Timing Analysis for Content-Based Wake-Up Realizing Informative IoT Data Collection

Information freshness and high energy-efficiency are key requirements for sensor nodes serving Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) applications, where a sink node must collect informative data before a deadline to control an external element. Pull-based communication is an interesting approach for optimizing information freshness and saving wasteful energy. To this end, we apply Content-based Wake-up (CoWu), in which the sink can activate a subset of nodes observing informative data at the time that wake-up signal is received. In this case, the timing of the wake-up signal plays an important role: early transmission leads to high reliability in data collection, but the received data may become obsolete by the deadline, while later transmission ensures a higher timeliness of the sensed data, but some nodes might not manage to communicate their data before the deadline. This letter investigates the timing for data collection using CoWu and characterizes the gain of CoWu. The obtained numerical results show that CoWu improves accuracy, while reducing energy consumption by about 75% with respect to round-robin scheduling.

Autoregressive graph Volterra models and applications

Graph-based learning and estimation are fundamental problems in various applications involving power, social, and brain networks, to name a few. While learning pair-wise interactions in network data is a well-studied problem, discovering higher-order interactions among subsets of nodes is still not yet fully explored. To this end, encompassing and leveraging (non)linear structural equation models as well as vector autoregressions, this paper proposes autoregressive graph Volterra models (AGVMs) that can capture not only the connectivity between nodes but also higher-order interactions presented in the networked data. The proposed overarching model inherits the identifiability and expressibility of the Volterra series. Furthermore, two tailored algorithms based on the proposed AGVM are put forth for topology identification and link prediction in distribution grids and social networks, respectively. Real-data experiments on different real-world collaboration networks highlight the impact of higher-order interactions in our approach, yielding discernible differences relative to existing methods.

Consensus graph learning-based self-supervised ensemble clustering

目的 随着实际应用场景中海量数据采集技术的发展和数据标注成本的不断增加，自监督学习成为海量数据分析的一个重要策略。然而，如何从海量数据中抽取有用的监督信息，并该监督信息下开展有效的学习仍然是制约该方向发展的研究难点。为此，提出了一个基于共识图学习的自监督集成聚类框架。方法 框架主要包括3个功能模块。首先，利用集成学习中多个基学习器构建共识图；其次，利用图神经网络分析共识图，捕获节点优化表示和节点的聚类结构，并从聚类中挑选高置信度的节点子集及对应的类标签生成监督信息；再次，在此标签监督下，联合其他无标注样本更新集成成员基学习器。交替迭代上述功能块，最终提高无监督聚类的性能。结果 为验证该框架的有效性，在标准数据集（包括图像和文本数据）上设计了一系列实验。实验结果表明，所提方法在性能上一致优于现有聚类方法。尤其是在MNIST-Test （modified national institute of standards and technology database）上，本文方法实现了97.78%的准确率，比已有最佳方法高出3.85%。结论 该方法旨在利用图表示学习提升自监督学习中监督信息捕获的能力，监督信息的有效获取进一步强化了集成学习中成员构建的能力，最终提升了无监督海量数据本质结构的挖掘性能。;Objective Clustering is focused on machine learning-related data segmentation for multiple datasets. Its applications are in relevant to such domains like image segmentation and anomaly detection. In addition，to simplify complex tasks optimize its performance，clustering is used in data preprocessing tasks of those are data sub-blocks segmentation， pseudo-labels generation，and abnormal points-removal. Self-supervised learning has become an essential technique for massive data analysis. However，it is challenged to extract effective supervision information and analyze the input data. Method A consensus graph learning based self-supervised ensemble clustering（CGL-SEC）framework is developed. It consists of three main modules：1）to construct the consensus graph based on several ensemble components（i. e. ，the basic clustering methods）. 2）to extract the supervision information by learning the consensus graph representation，and 3）its node clustering results，where the subset of nodes with the high-confidence are selected as labeled samples. To optimize the ensemble components and the corresponding consensus graph，t basic clustering methods are re-trained in related the option of samples-labeled and other samples-unlabeled. The final clustering results can be optimized iteratively until the learning process converges. Result A series of experiments are carried out on benchmarks，including both image and textual datasets. Especially，CGL-SEC is 3. 85% over baseline in terms of clustering evaluation metric on themodified national institute of standards and technology database（MNIST-Test）. First，to optimize data representation and cluster assignment at the same time，deep embedding clustering can be focused on data itself as the supervision information and auto-encoder with the reconstruction loss is pre-trained. The soft cluster assignment of features-embedded is then calculated，and the KL（Kullback-Leibler）divergence is minimized between the soft cluster assignment and the auxiliary target distribution. To improve the performance of the model further，following deep clustering network（DCN）can use hard clustering instead of soft allocation，and local constraints are applied by improved deep embedding clustering（IDEC）. The pseudo-label strategy is implemented as a self-supervised learning method that uses the prediction results of the neural network as the label to simulate the supervision information compared to using data itself as the supervision information. Deepcluster-based K-means clustering is used to generate pseudo-labels to guide the training of convolutional networks. However，the generated pseudo-labels have lower confidence and are prone to trivial solutions in the initial stage of network training. Deep embedding clustering with data augmentation（DEC-DA）and MixMatch-based prediction of data-enhanced samples are used as the supervision information of the original data，which improves the accuracy of the supervision information to a certain extent，but this method is difficult to extend to text and other fields. Deep adaptive clustering-based high-confidence pseudo-label subsets-selected are iteratively trained the network in the prediction results，but lowconfidence samples-involved data distribution information is ignored. Pseudo-semi-supervised clustering votes are used to select a subset of high-confidence pseudo-labels，and all samples are used to train semi-supervised neural network. Although the ensemble strategy can improve the confidence of the pseudo-label，the voting strategy is concerned of category representation only without the feature representation of the sample itself，which can reduce the clustering performance in some cases. The ensemble learning is regarded as a representative machine learning method that reflects the ability of group intelligence，whereas a learning method can improve the overall prediction performance via multiple base learners training and their coordinated prediction results. In pseudo-label-based clustering tasks，it can coordinate multiple base learners to obtain high-confidence pseudo-labels. However，the effectiveness of the supervision information acquisition is still to be resolved. The category information of the sample is considered for current pseudo-label-based ensemble clustering method only when the label is captured and some effective information are ignored like the feature representation of the sample itself and the clustering structure between samples. Conclusion Graph neural network is composed of content information of nodes and the structural information between nodes at the same time. To design a self-supervised ensemble clustering method based on consensus graph representation learning，it is required to make full use of sample features and relationships between samples in ensemble learning. To obtain higher confidence pseudo-labels as supervised information and improve the performance of self-supervised clustering，it is necessary to mine global and local information at the same time. We illustrate a learnable data ensemble representation through graph neural network. The confidence of pseudo-labels is improved，and the entire model is trained in self-supervision iteratively. To be summarized：1）Commonly-used consensus graph learning-integrated clustering framework is developed，which can use multi-level information like clusteringintegrated sample characteristics and category structure. 2）Self-supervision method is proposed，which uses graph neural network to mine the global and local information of the consensus graph，and high-confidence pseudo-labels are obtained as supervised information. 3）Experiments are demonstrated that the consensus graph learning ensemble clustering method has its potentials on image and text datasets.

Berrut Approximated Coded Computing: Straggler Resistance Beyond Polynomial Computing.

One of the major challenges in using distributed learning to train complicated models with large data sets is to deal with stragglers effect. As a solution, coded computation has been recently proposed to efficiently add redundancy to the computation tasks. In this technique, coding is used across data sets, and computation is done over coded data, such that the results of an arbitrary subset of worker nodes with a certain size are enough to recover the final results. The major drawbacks with those approaches are (1) they are limited to polynomial functions, (2) the number of servers that we need to wait for grows with the degree of the model, (3) they are not numerically stable for computation over real numbers. In this paper, we propose Berrut Approximated Coded Computing (BACC), as an alternative approach, as a numerically stable solution, which works beyond polynomial functions computation and with any number of servers. The accuracy of the approximation is established theoretically and verified by simulation. In particular, BACC is used to train a deep neural network on a cluster of servers, which outperforms alternative uncoded solutions in terms of the rate of convergence.

Batch virtual adversarial training for graph convolutional networks

We present batch virtual adversarial training (BVAT), a novel regularization method for graph convolutional networks (GCNs). BVAT addresses the issue that GCNs do not ensure the smoothness of the model’s output distribution against local perturbations around the input node features. We propose two algorithms, sampling-based BVAT and optimization-based BVAT, which promote the output smoothness of GCN classifiers based on the generated virtual adversarial perturbations for either a subset of independent nodes or all nodes via an elaborate optimization process. Extensive experiments on three citation network datasets Cora, Citeseer and Pubmed and a knowledge graph dataset Nell validate the efficacy of the proposed method in semi-supervised node classification tasks.

Distributed Sensor Selection for Speech Enhancement With Acoustic Sensor Networks

In distributed acoustic sensor networks, only a few nodes make a significant contribution to speech enhancement tasks. Using these most informative nodes instead of the entire network not only avoids unnecessary energy consumption but also prolongs the lifetime of sensors. To this end, a sensor selection method for distributed speech enhancement is proposed. The best subset of microphone nodes is determined by maximizing the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), while keeping the activated nodes connected with each other. The above criterion involves an integer and non-linear programming, which is linearized with multiple base-3 sub-optimization problems, and each of them is solved by a state-of-the-art steepest descent (SD) algorithm. In addition, a greedy searching strategy is presented to select sensors rapidly. Finally, a distributed SD algorithm is further derived, which is more suitable for distributed sensor networks. The proposed method can obtain the optimal subnetwork in noisy and reverberant environments. Unlike the existing approaches, it can select nodes from a microphone network with arbitrary communication graphs. Moreover, it requires only local communications among nodes without an external central processor. Experimental results confirm the validity of the proposed method.