In addition to traditional concerns such as throughput and latency, freshness is becoming increasingly important. To stay fresh, applications stream status updates among their components. Existing studies propose the metric age of information (AoI) to gauge the freshness and design systems to achieve low AoI. Despite active research in this area, existing results are not applicable to general wired networks for two reasons. First, they focus on wireless settings where AoI is mostly affected by interference and collision while queueing is more dominant in wired settings. Second, the legacy drop-adverse flows are not taken into account in the literature. Scheduling mixed flows with distinct performance objective is not yet addressed. In this paper, we study wired networks shared by two classes of flows, aiming for high throughput and low AoI respectively, and achieve a good trade-off between their throughput and AoI. Our approach to the problem consists of two layers: freshness-aware traffic engineering (FATE) and in-network freshness control (IFC). FATE derives sending rate/update frequency for flows via optimization, and its solution is then enforced by IFC through efficient scheduling mechanisms at each outport of in-network nodes. We also present efficient Linux implementation of IFC and demonstrate the effectiveness of FATE/IFC through extensive emulations. Our results show that it is possible to trade a little throughput (5 % lower) for much shorter AoI (49 to 71% shorter) compared to state-of-the-art traffic engineering.
Airborne diseases, including COVID-19, raise the question of transmission risk in public transportation systems. However, quantitative analysis of the effectiveness of transmission risk mitigation methods in public transportation is lacking. The paper develops a transmission risk modeling framework based on the Wells-Riley model using as inputs transit operating characteristics, schedule, Origin-Destination (OD) demand, and virus characteristics. The model is sensitive to various factors that operators can control, as well as external factors that may be subject of broader policy decisions (e.g. mask wearing). The model is utilized to assess transmission risk as a function of OD flows, planned operations, and factors such as mask-wearing, ventilation, and infection rates. Using actual data from the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (MBTA) Red Line, the paper explores the transmission risk under different infection rate scenarios, both in magnitude and spatial characteristics. The paper assesses the combined impact from viral load related factors and passenger load factors. Increasing frequency can mitigate transmission risk, but cannot fully compensate for increases in infection rates. Imbalanced passenger distribution on different cars of a train is shown to increase the overall system-wide infection probability. Spatial infection rate patterns should also be taken into account during policymaking as it is shown to impact transmission risk. For lines with branches, demand distribution among the branches is important and headway allocation adjustment among branches to balance the load on trains to different branches can help reduce risk.
Weighted round robin (WRR) is a simple, efficient packet scheduler providing low latency and fairness by assigning flow weights that define the number of possible packets to be sent consecutively. A variant of WRR that mitigates its tendency to increase burstiness, called interleaved weighted round robin (IWRR), has seen analytical treatment recently \cite{TLBB21}; a network calculus approach was used to obtain the best-possible strict service curve. From a different perspective, WRR can also be interpreted as an emulation of an idealized fair scheduler known as generalized processor sharing (GPS). Inspired by profound literature results on the performance analysis of GPS, we show that both, WRR and IWRR, belong to a larger class of fair schedulers called bandwidth-sharing policies. We use this insight to derive new strict service curves for both schedulers that, under the additional assumption of constrained cross-traffic flows, can significantly improve the state-of-the-art results and lead to smaller delay bounds.
In 5G and beyond systems, the notion of latency gets a great momentum in wireless connectivity as a metric for serving real-time communications requirements. However, in many applications, research has pointed out that latency could be inefficient to handle applications with data freshness requirements. Recently, the notion of Age of Information (AoI) that can capture the freshness of the data has attracted a lot of attention. In this work, we consider mixed traffic with time-sensitive users; a deadline-constrained user, and an AoI-oriented user. To develop an efficient scheduling policy, we cast a novel optimization problem formulation for minimizing the average AoI while satisfying the timely throughput constraints. The formulated problem is cast as a Constrained Markov Decision Process (CMDP). We relax the constrained problem to an unconstrained Markov Decision Process (MDP) problem by utilizing Lyapunov optimization theory and it can be proved that it is solved per frame by applying backward dynamic programming algorithms with optimality guarantees. Simulation results show that the timely throughput constraints are satisfied while minimizing the average AoI. Also, simulation results show the convergence of the algorithm for different values of the weighted factor and the trade-off between the AoI and the timely throughput.
This paper considers a cell-free massive MIMO (CF-mMIMO) system using conjugate beamforming (CB) with fractional-exponent normalization. Assuming independent Rayleigh fading channels, a generalized closed-form expression for the achievable downlink spectral efficiency is derived, which subsumes, as special cases, the spectral efficiency expressions previously reported for plain CB and its variants, i.e. normalized CB and enhanced CB. Downlink power control is also tackled, and a reduced-complexity power allocation strategy is proposed, wherein only one coefficient for access point (AP) is optimized based on the long-term fading realizations. Numerical results unveil the performance of CF-mMIMO with CB and fractional-exponent normalization, and show that the proposed power optimization rule incurs a moderate performance loss with respect to the traditional max-min power control rule, but with lower complexity and much smaller overall power consumption.
Aerial robots can enhance their safe and agile navigation in complex and cluttered environments by efficiently exploiting the information collected during a given task. In this paper, we address the learning model predictive control problem for quadrotors. We design a learning receding--horizon nonlinear control strategy directly formulated on the system nonlinear manifold configuration space SO(3)xR^3. The proposed approach exploits past successful task iterations to improve the system performance over time while respecting system dynamics and actuator constraints. We further relax its computational complexity making it compatible with real-time quadrotor control requirements. We show the effectiveness of the proposed approach in learning a minimum time control task, respecting dynamics, actuators, and environment constraints. Several experiments in simulation and real-world set-up validate the proposed approach.
In this paper, we study a routing and travel-mode choice problem for mobility systems with a multimodal transportation network as a mobility game with coupled hybrid action sets. The mobility resources (modes of transportation) may experience delays that grow with the aggregate utilization of the resource. We develop a theoretical framework based on repeated non-cooperative game theory for the travelers' routing and travel-mode choice within a general mobility system. This framework aims to study the behavioral impact of the travelers' decision-making on efficiency. We consider the traffic congestion and the waiting times at different transport hubs and introduce mobility monetary incentives as part of a pricing scheme. We show that the travelers' selfish behavior results in a Nash equilibrium, and then we perform a Price of Anarchy analysis to establish that the mobility system's inefficiencies remain relatively low as the number of travelers increases. We deviate from the standard game-theoretic analysis of decision-making by extending our modeling framework to capture the subjective behavior of travelers using prospect theory. Finally, we provide a simple example to showcase the effectiveness of our mobility game and incentives.
Nonbinary polar codes defined over Galois field GF(q) have shown improved error-correction performance than binary polar codes using successive-cancellation list (SCL) decoding. However, nonbinary operations are complex and a direct-mapped decoder results in a low throughput, representing difficulties for practical adoptions. In this work, we develop, to the best of our knowledge, the first hardware implementation for nonbinary SCL polar decoding. We present a high-throughput decoder architecture using a split-tree algorithm. The sub-trees are decoded in parallel by smaller sub-decoders with a reconciliation stage to maintain constraints between sub-trees. A skimming algorithm is proposed to reduce the reconciliation complexity for further improved throughput. The split-tree nonbinary SCL (S-NBSCL) polar decoder is prototyped using a 28nm CMOS technology for a (128,64) polar code over GF(256). The decoder delivers 26.1 Mb/s throughput, 11.65 Mb/s/mm$^2$ area efficiency and 28.8 nJ/b energy efficiency, outperforming the direct-mapped decoder by 10.3x, 4.4x and 2.7x, respectively, while achieving excellent error-correction performance.
Free space optical (FSO) communication refers to the information transmission technology based on the propagation of optical signals in space. FSO communication requires that the transmitter and receiver directly see each other. High-altitude platforms (HAPs) have been proposed for carrying FSO transceivers in the stratosphere. A multihop HAP network with FSO links can relay traffic between ground FSO nodes. In this study, we propose an end-to-end switching model for forwarding traffic between massive pairs of ground FSO nodes over a HAP network. A protection mechanism is employed for improving the communication survivability in the presence of clouds, which may break the line of sight (LoS) between HAPs and ground nodes. We propose an algorithm for designing the topology of the survivable HAP network, given a set of ground FSO nodes. The results demonstrate that, even though networks with survivable capacity use more resources, they are not necessary much more expensive than those without survivability in terms of equipment, i.e., HAPs and FSO devices, and in terms of wavelength resource utilization.
Residential consumers have become active participants in the power distribution network after being equipped with residential EV charging provisions. This creates a challenge for the network operator tasked with dispatching electric power to the residential consumers through the existing distribution network infrastructure in a reliable manner. In this paper, we address the problem of scheduling residential EV charging for multiple consumers while maintaining network reliability. An additional challenge is the restricted exchange of information: where the consumers do not have access to network information and the network operator does not have access to consumer load parameters. We propose a distributed framework which generates an optimal EV charging schedule for individual residential consumers based on their preferences and iteratively updates it until the network reliability constraints set by the operator are satisfied. We validate the proposed approach for different EV adoption levels in a synthetically created digital twin of an actual power distribution network. The results demonstrate that the new approach can achieve a higher level of network reliability compared to the case where residential consumers charge EVs based solely on their individual preferences, thus providing a solution for the existing grid to keep up with increased adoption rates without significant investments in increasing grid capacity.
Neural sequence-to-sequence networks with attention have achieved remarkable performance for machine translation. One of the reasons for their effectiveness is their ability to capture relevant source-side contextual information at each time-step prediction through an attention mechanism. However, the target-side context is solely based on the sequence model which, in practice, is prone to a recency bias and lacks the ability to capture effectively non-sequential dependencies among words. To address this limitation, we propose a target-side-attentive residual recurrent network for decoding, where attention over previous words contributes directly to the prediction of the next word. The residual learning facilitates the flow of information from the distant past and is able to emphasize any of the previously translated words, hence it gains access to a wider context. The proposed model outperforms a neural MT baseline as well as a memory and self-attention network on three language pairs. The analysis of the attention learned by the decoder confirms that it emphasizes a wider context, and that it captures syntactic-like structures.