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Cognitive radio networks (CRNs) have been proposed to solve the spectrum scarcity problem. One of their fundamental procedures is to construct a communication link on a common channel for the users, which is referred to as rendezvous. In reality, the capability to sense the spectrum may vary from user to user. We study distributed rendezvous for heterogeneous sensing capabilities in this paper. The licensed spectrum is divided into $n$ n channels, $U = \lbrace 1,2,\ldots,n\rbrace$ U = { 1 , 2 ,... , n } . We denote the sensing capability of user $i$ i as $C_i \subseteq U$ C i ⊆ U and the set of available channels (i.e., the channels not occupied by paying users) as $V_i \subseteq C_i$ V i ⊆ C i . Due to hardware differences, the users may have different sensing capabilities: $C_i \ne C_j$ C i ≠ C j , and this is called heterogeneous sensing capability. In this paper, we propose efficient algorithms for two scenarios: the fully available scenario where $V_i = C_i$ V i = C i and the partially available scenario where $V_i \subseteq C_i$ V i ⊆ C i . Our idea is to utilize two ‘pointers’ to traverse the sensing capability set, which sets our algorithms apart from the extant rendezvous algorithms. Considering any two neighboring users $a, b$ a , b , we propose the Traversing Pointer (TP) algorithm that guarantees rendezvous in $O(\max \lbrace |C_a|,|C_b|\rbrace \log \log n)$ O (max { | C a | , | C b | } log log n) time slots for the fully available scenario. This result is only $O(\log \log n)$ O (log log n) larger than the theoretical lower bound. Moreover, it removes an $O(\min \lbrace |C_a|,|C_b|\rbrace)$ O (min { | C a | , | C b | }) factor when compared to the state-of-the-art result ($O(|C_a||C_b|)$ O (| C a | | C b |) in S.-H. Wu et al. For the partially available scenario, we propose the Moving Traversing Pointers (MTP) and Prime based Moving Traversing Pointers (P-MTP) algorithms that can guarantee rendezvous within $O((\max \lbrace |V_a|,|V_b|\rbrace)^2\log \log n)$ O ((max { | V a | , | V b | }) 2 log log n) and $O(|V_a||V_b|\log \log n)$ O (| V a | | V b | log log n) time slots respectively, where the latter one combines the pointers and a common technique of plugging in a prime number. The proposed algorithms work more efficiently than the previous best result ($O(|C_a||C_b|)$ O (| C a | | C b |) in C.-C. Wu et al. under various circumstances. We also conduct extensive simulations and the results corroborate our analyses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In task offloading systems, it is imperative to guarantee that an offloaded task is completed within a pre-specified deadline. In this paper, we propose a distributed device-to-device (D2D) offloading system (DDOS) in which a task owner opportunistically broadcasts an offloading request that includes its mobility level and task completion deadline. After receiving the request, mobile devices in the vicinity of the task owner employ a constraint stochastic game to decide, in a distributed manner, whether to accept the request or not. We devise a best response dynamics-based algorithm (BRDA) to obtain a multi-policy constrained Nash equilibrium. Evaluation results demonstrate that DDOS can guarantee a high on-time task completion probability, as well as a low energy consumption. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Connected and automated vehicles will enable advanced traffic safety and efficiency applications thanks to the dynamic exchange of information between vehicles, and between vehicles and infrastructure nodes. Connected vehicles can utilize IEEE 802.11p for vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) and vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) communications. However, a widespread deployment of connected vehicles and the introduction of connected automated driving applications will notably increase the bandwidth and scalability requirements of vehicular networks. This paper proposes to address these challenges through the adoption of heterogeneous V2V communications in multi-link and multi-RAT vehicular networks. In particular, the paper proposes the first distributed (and decentralized) context-aware heterogeneous V2V communications algorithm that is technology and application agnostic, and that allows each vehicle to autonomously and dynamically select its communications technology taking into account its application requirements and the communication context conditions. This study demonstrates the potential of heterogeneous V2V communications, and the capability of the proposed algorithm to satisfy the vehicles’ application requirements while approaching the estimated upper bound network capacity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The development of Blockchain-based mobile applications are impeded due to the resource limitations of mobile devices. Computation offloading can be a viable solution. In this paper, we consider a two-layer computation offloading paradigm including an edge computing service provider (ESP) and a cloud computing service provider (CSP). We formulate a multi-leader multi-follower Stackelberg game to address the computing resource management problem in such a network, by jointly maximizing the profits of each service provider (SP) and the payoffs of individual miners. We study two practical scenarios: a fixed-miner-number scenario for permissioned blockchains and a dynamic-miner-number scenario for permissionless blockchains. For the fixed-miner-number scenario, we discuss two different edge operation modes, i.e., the ESP is connected (to the CSP) or standalone, which form different miner subgames based on whether each miner's strategy set is mutually dependent. The existence and uniqueness of Stackelberg equilibrium (SE) in both modes are analyzed, according to which algorithms are proposed to achieve the corresponding SE(s). For the dynamic-miner-number scenario, we focus on the impact of population uncertainty and find that the uncertainty inflates the aggressiveness in the ESP resource purchasing. Numerical evaluations are presented to verify the proposed models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The integration of aerial base stations carried by drones in cellular networks offers promising opportunities to enhance the connectivity enjoyed by ground users. In this paper, we propose an optimization framework for the 3–D placement and repositioning of a fleet of drones with a realistic inter-drone interference model and drone connectivity constraints. We show how to maximize network coverage by means of an extremal-optimization algorithm. The design of our algorithm is based on a mixed-integer non-convex program formulation for a coverage problem that is NP-Complete, as we prove in the paper. We not only optimize drone positions in a 3–D space in polynomial time, but also assign flight routes solving an assignment problem and using a strong geometrical tool, namely Bézier curves, which are extremely useful for non-uniform and realistic topologies. Specifically, we propose to fly drones following Bézier curves to seek the chance of approaching to clusters of ground users. This enhances coverage over time while users and drones move. We assess the performance of our proposal for synthetic scenarios as well as realistic maps extracted from the topology of a capital city. We demonstrate that our framework is near-optimal and using Bézier curves increases coverage up to 47 percent while drones move. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the rapid spread of mobile devices, many traditional online social network services, like academic applications, start to develop mobile apps and improve their service quality through mobile sensing. A rich friendship among users can provide support for such applications, e.g., help to delegate sensing tasks in mobile crowd sensing. Therefore, studying friend recommendation that offers users’ suggestions on who to connect to, so as to enrich the user's friendship, is necessary to Mobile Social Networks (MSNs). Most existing strategies utilize user's relationship, or similarity, to make the recommendation, which overlooks the existence of multi-type connections among users, e.g., common paper based and common topic based connections among authors in academic networks. To overcome such limitation, we characterize each type of connections by a corresponding network layer and then propose a novel algorithm for joint recommendations in multilayer MSNs. Particularly, two types of results are presented in the paper. (i) Our proposed algorithm, named as Cross-layer 2-hop Path (C2P) algorithm, implements the joint recommendation by suggesting a user establish connections to his cross-layer two-hop neighbors, i.e., those who link to the user by two-hop paths with the two hops belonging to two different layers, respectively. In doing so, each produced recommendation item is a combination of user relationships in both two layers and therefore can better meet user demands. (ii) By analytical derivations, along with further empirical validation on real datasets, we give the performance evaluation on our proposed algorithm. First, we prove that the algorithm is efficiently implementable with a constant complexity of each recommendation in most cases. Then, we evaluate its recommendation performance by two metrics, i.e., accuracy and diversity, where the former metric measures recommendation accuracy and the latter one measures an algorithm's capability to provide diverse recommendation items. Our results show that C2P algorithm is optimal in terms of accuracy and for diversity, its performance is no less than the algorithm that is applied in single layers. And finally, the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm is validated on both synthetic and large-scale real datasets, where it outperforms the baseline algorithms with an up to 32 percent accuracy gain and obtains an approximately 0.5 ratio of the algorithm's diversity to the theoretical upperbound. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers mobile computation offloading where task completion times are subject to hard deadline constraints. Hard deadlines are difficult to meet in conventional computation offloading due to the stochastic nature of the wireless channels involved. Rather than using binary offload decisions, we permit concurrent remote and local job execution when it is needed to ensure task completion deadlines. The paper addresses this problem for homogeneous Markovian wireless channel models. An online energy-optimal computation offloading algorithm, OnOpt, is proposed. Its energy optimality is shown by constructing a time-dilated absorbing Markov process and applying dynamic programming. Closed form results are derived for general Markovian processes, and the Gilbert-Elliott channel model is used to show how the particular structure of the Markov chain can be exploited in computing optimal offload initiation times more efficiently. It is shown that job completion time probabilities can be computed recursively, which leads to a significant reduction in the computational complexity of OnOpt. The performance of the proposed algorithm is compared to three others, namely, Immediate Offloading, Channel Threshold, and Local Execution. Performance results show that the proposed algorithm can significantly improve mobile device energy consumption compared to the other approaches while guaranteeing hard task execution deadlines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Localizing ground devices (GDs) is an important requirement for a wide variety of applications, such as infrastructure monitoring, precision agriculture, search and rescue operations, to name a few. To this end, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) or drones offer a promising technology due to their flexibility. However, the distance measurements performed using a drone, an integral part of a localization procedure, incur several errors that affect the localization accuracy. In this paper, we provide analytical expressions for the impact of different kinds of measurement errors on the ground distance between the UAV and GDs. We review three range-based and three range-free localization algorithms, identify their source of errors, and analytically derive the error bounds resulting from aggregating multiple inaccurate measurements. We then extend the range-free algorithms for improved accuracy. We validate our theoretical analysis and compare the observed localization error of the algorithms after collecting data from a testbed using ten GDs and one drone, equipped with ultra wide band (UWB) antennas and operating in an open field. Results show that our analysis closely matches with experimental localization errors. Moreover, compared to their original counterparts, the extended range-free algorithms significantly improve the accuracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses the coexistence problem among multiple wireless body area networks (WBANs), where co-channel interference may occur among different WBANs if the channels are not allocated properly, leading to performance degradation in both energy efficiency and packet transmission reliability. We formulate the channel allocation problem as a graph coloring problem, and develop a solution to increase the co-channel reuse and the number of WBANs with assigned channels. We propose a distributed two-hop incomplete coloring (DTIC) algorithm that adopts a game-theoretic approach to solve the graph coloring problem. The DTIC algorithm exploits two-hop information to enable high channel reuse among two-hop neighbors and allows for incomplete coloring when the number of colors (or channels) is insufficient to color all vertices without conflict. A distributed message-passing protocol is also proposed to achieve collision-free message exchange, and to ensure that consistent coloring information is shared among WBANs. Simulation results show that our proposed algorithm achieves better co-channel reuse and higher throughput than existing methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In cognitive radio networks (CRNs), dynamic spectrum access allows (unlicensed) users to identify and access unused channels opportunistically, thus improves spectrum utilization. In this paper, we address the user-channel allocation problem in multi-user multi-channel CRNs without a prior knowledge of channel statistics. The result of channel access is stochastic with unknown distribution, and statistically different for each user. In deciding the channel for access, a user needs to either explore a channel to learn its statistics, or exploit the channel with the highest expected reward based on the information collected so far. Further, a channel should be accessed exclusively by one user at a time to avoid collision. Using multi-armed bandit framework, we develop two rate-optimal algorithms with low computational complexities of $O(N)$ O (N) and $O(NK)$ O (N K) , respectively, where $N$ N denotes the number of users and $K$ K denotes the number of channels. Further, we extend the results and develop an algorithm that is amenable to implement in a distributed fashion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper studies the problem of cHarging tAsk Scheduling for direcTional wireless chargEr networks (HASTE), i.e., given a set of rotatable directional wireless chargers on a 2D area and a series of offline (online) charging tasks, scheduling the orientations of all the chargers with time in a centralized offline (distributed online) fashion to maximize the overall charging utility for all the tasks. We prove that HASTE is NP-hard. Then, we prove that a relaxed version of HASTE falls within the realm of maximizing a submodular function subject to a partition matroid constraint, and propose a centralized offline algorithm that achieves $(1-\rho)(1-\frac{1}{e})$ (1 - ρ) (1 - 1 e) approximation ratio to address HASTE where $\rho$ ρ is the switching delay of chargers. Further, we propose a distributed online algorithm and prove it achieves $\frac{1}{2}(1-\rho)(1-\frac{1}{e})$ 1 2 (1 - ρ) (1 - 1 e) competitive ratio. We conduct simulations and field experiments on a testbed consisting of eight off-the-shelf power transmitters and 8 rechargeable sensor nodes. The results show that our distributed online algorithm achieves 92.97 percent of the optimal charging utility, and outperforms the comparison algorithms by up to 15.28 percent in terms of charging utility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mobile crowdsensing is a new paradigm by which a platform can recruit mobile workers to perform some sensing tasks by using their smart mobile devices. In this paper, we focus on a privacy-preserving unknown worker recruitment issue. The platform needs to recruit some workers without knowing the qualities of them completing tasks. Meanwhile, these quality information also needs to be protected from disclosure. To tackle these challenges, we model the unknown worker recruitment as a Differentially Private Multi-Armed Bandit (DP-MAB) game by seeing each worker as an arm of DP-MAB and the task completion quality contributed by each worker as the reward of pulling arm. Then, recruiting workers is equivalent to designing a bandit policy of pulling DP-MAB arms. Under this model, we propose a Differentially Private ε-First-based arm-pulling (DPF) algorithm and a Differentially Private UCB-based arm-pulling (DPU) algorithm, which can achieve the nearly optimal expected accumulative rewards under a given budget. We also analyze the regrets of the DPF and DPU algorithms and prove that both of them are δ -differentially private on the task completion qualities (δ > 0). Finally, we conduct extensive simulations to verify the significant performances of DPF and DPU based on both the real-trace and synthetic datasets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Widespread and large-scale WiFi systems have been deployed in many corporate locations, while the backhual capacity becomes the bottleneck in providing high-rate data services to a tremendous number of WiFi users. Mobile edge caching is a promising solution to relieve backhaul pressure and deliver quality services by proactively pushing contents to access points (APs). However, how to deploy cache in large-scale WiFi system is not well studied yet quite challenging since numerous APs can have heterogeneous traffic characteristics, and future traffic conditions are unknown ahead. In this paper, given the cache storage budget, we explore the cache deployment in a large-scale WiFi system, which contains 8,000 APs and serves more than 40,000 active users, to maximize the long-term caching gain. Specifically, we first collect two-month user association records and conduct intensive spatio-temporal analytics on WiFi traffic consumption, gaining two major observations. First, per AP traffic consumption varies in a rather wide range and the proportion of AP distributes evenly within the range, indicating that the cache size should be heterogeneously allocated in accordance to the underlying traffic demands. Second, compared to a single AP, the traffic consumption of a group of APs (clustered by physical locations) is more stable, which means that the short-term traffic statistics can be used to infer the future long-term traffic conditions. We then propose our cache deployment strategy, named LeaD (i.e., Large-scale WiFi Edge cAche Deployment), in which we first cluster large-scale APs into well-sized edge nodes, then conduct the stationary testing on edge level traffic consumption and sample sufficient traffic statistics in order to precisely characterize long-term traffic conditions, and finally devise the TEG (Traffic-wEighted Greedy) algorithm to solve the long-term caching gain maximization problem. Extensive trace-driven experiments are carried out, and the results demonstrate that LeaD is able to achieve the near-optimal caching performance and can outperform other benchmark strategies significantly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Wireless relay network has been widely used in many applications to improve the wireless service. In this paper, we aim to maximize users' satisfaction by deploying limited number of relays in a target region to form a wireless relay network, and define the Deployment of Cooperative Relay (DoCR) problem, which is proved to be NP-complete. We first propose two approximation algorithms, an $O(\log n)$O(logn) algorithm that utilizes the algorithms for budget weighted Steiner tree problem with novel position weighting assignment, and an $O(\sqrt{k})$O(k) algorithm that iteratively scans potential positions and determines relay placement plan with the help of submodular function theory, partition technique, and greedy strategy. We name them Relay Effective Deployment Algoirthm (REDA) and Submodular Iterative Deployment Algorithm (SIDA), respectively. We further propose Gradient-Descent Based Algorithm (GDBA), a heuristic method, to solve the DoCR problem releasing potential location constraints. Our extensive experiments indicate that the algorithms we propose can significantly improve the total satisfaction of the network. Furthermore, we establish a testbed using USRP to showcase our designs in real scenarios. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to propose approximation algorithms for relay placement problem to maximize user satisfaction, which has both theoretical and practical significance in the related area. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we present a novel learning-aided energy management scheme ($\mathtt {LEM}$ LEM ) for multihop energy harvesting networks. Different from prior works on this problem, our algorithm explicitly incorporates information learning into system control via a step called perturbed dual learning. $\mathtt {LEM}$ LEM does not require any statistical information of the system dynamics for implementation, and efficiently resolves the challenging energy outage problem. We show that $\mathtt {LEM}$ LEM achieves the near-optimal $[O(\epsilon), O(\log (1/\epsilon)^2)]$ [ O (ε) , O (log (1 / ε) 2) ] utility-delay tradeoff with an $O(1/\epsilon ^{1-c/2})$ O (1 / ε 1 - c / 2) energy buffers ($c\in (0,1)$ c ∈ (0 , 1) ). More interestingly, $\mathtt {LEM}$ LEM possesses a convergence time of $O(1/\epsilon ^{1-c/2} +1/\epsilon ^c)$ O (1 / ε 1 - c / 2 + 1 / ε c) , which is much faster than the $\Theta (1/\epsilon)$ Θ (1 / ε) time of pure queue-based techniques or the $\Theta (1/\epsilon ^2)$ Θ (1 / ε 2) time of approaches that rely purely on learning the system statistics. This fast convergence property makes $\mathtt {LEM}$ LEM more adaptive and efficient in resource allocation in dynamic environments. The design and analysis of $\mathtt {LEM}$ LEM demonstrate how system control algorithms can be augmented by learning and what the benefits are. The methodology and algorithm can also be applied to similar problems, e.g., processing networks, where nodes require nonzero contents to support their actions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Age of information is a new network performance metric that captures the freshness of information at end-users. This paper studies the age of information from a scheduling perspective. To that end, we consider a wireless broadcast network where a base-station (BS) is updating many users on random information arrivals under a transmission capacity constraint. For the offline case when the arrival statistics are known to the BS, we develop a structural MDP scheduling algorithm and an index scheduling algorithm, leveraging Markov decision process (MDP) techniques and the Whittle's methodology for restless bandits. By exploring optimal structural results, we not only reduce the computational complexity of the MDP-based algorithm, but also simplify deriving a closed form of the Whittle index. Moreover, for the online case, we develop an MDP-based online scheduling algorithm and an index-based online scheduling algorithm. Both the structural MDP scheduling algorithm and the MDP-based online scheduling algorithm asymptotically minimize the average age, while the index scheduling algorithm minimizes the average age when the information arrival rates for all users are the same. Finally, the algorithms are validated via extensive numerical studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 802.11ac is a significant landmark in wireless communications, as it pushes towards new rate limits by utilizing downlink multiuser multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) beamforming to transmit data to various locations simultaneously. However, successful beamforming relies on intelligent user selection which requires, in turn, extensive overhead of channel calibration between the AP and each of the candidate users. The large overhead involved in the user selection procedure overwhelms the multiuser gain and hinders the utilization of multiuser MIMO. The phenomenon is even more acute when APs handle large groups of mobile users, which frequently associate and disconnect, making the process of acquiring channel state from all users and selecting the appropriate group even harder. Thus, the subtle relation between the achievable rate of a scheduling algorithm and the overhead it requires is significant for the 802.11ac performance analysis. In this paper, we provide a rigorous analysis of distributed algorithms that schedule a group of users for the downlink. In particular, we accommodate common scheduling methods for the 802.11ac protocol and analyze both their achievable rate and their calibration process overhead. Both analysis and extensive simulations depict the superiority of simple threshold-based methods in terms of the throughput. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Wireless powered mobile-edge computing (MEC) has recently emerged as a promising paradigm to enhance the data processing capability of low-power networks, such as wireless sensor networks and internet of things (IoT). In this paper, we consider a wireless powered MEC network that adopts a binary offloading policy, so that each computation task of wireless devices (WDs) is either executed locally or fully offloaded to an MEC server. Our goal is to acquire an online algorithm that optimally adapts task offloading decisions and wireless resource allocations to the time-varying wireless channel conditions. This requires quickly solving hard combinatorial optimization problems within the channel coherence time, which is hardly achievable with conventional numerical optimization methods. To tackle this problem, we propose a Deep Reinforcement learning-based Online Offloading (DROO) framework that implements a deep neural network as a scalable solution that learns the binary offloading decisions from the experience. It eliminates the need of solving combinatorial optimization problems, and thus greatly reduces the computational complexity especially in large-size networks. To further reduce the complexity, we propose an adaptive procedure that automatically adjusts the parameters of the DROO algorithm on the fly. Numerical results show that the proposed algorithm can achieve near-optimal performance while significantly decreasing the computation time by more than an order of magnitude compared with existing optimization methods. For example, the CPU execution latency of DROO is less than 0.1 second in a 30-user network, making real-time and optimal offloading truly viable even in a fast fading environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The capability to anticipate a contact with another device can contribute to improving the performance and user satisfaction of mobile social network applications and of any other relying on some form of data harvesting or hoarding. This paper presents a nine year data set of wireless access logs produced by more than 70,000 devices and 40,000 users. Research on the recurring contact patterns observed between groups of devices permitted to model the probabilities of occurrence of a contact at a predefined date between pairs of devices. As an example, the paper presents and evaluates an algorithm that provides daily contact predictions, based on the history of past pairwise contacts and its application on a reputation service. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In cognitive radio (CR), the problem of spectrum hole detection has been extensively studied in single dimension, such as frequency domain, spatial domain, and so on. Recently, a class of two dimension spectrum hole detection methods, named as joint angle-frequency estimation (JAFE), has attracted much attention. Nevertheless, most of the existing approaches are only suitable for the scenario with matching frequency-angle pairs, rather than the non-matching scenario between the two parameters, like space division multiple access (SDMA) or frequency division multiplexing access (FDMA) communication mode which allows the same frequency band (or angle) to be reused in different angles (or frequencies). For the above two cases, including matching and non-matching scenarios, this paper develops an effective frequency-angle spectrum hole detection algorithm with Taylor expansion based focusing transformation (TFT-FASHD), on the basis of signal sparse representation by extending the array manifold from angle domain to frequency-angle domain. In the proposed method, for Fourier transform representation of the sparse model, a focusing transformation based on Taylor expansion is first performed to focus the signal subspaces at different frequencies to a single frequency, so as to carry out dimension reduction of dictionary in angular domain. TFT is derived by decomposing the array manifold with Taylor expansion, and further the optimum focusing frequency of focusing transform is discussed theoretically. Second, atoms with high representative performance are chosen by the presented TFT and compressed sensing (CS). Third, according to the low dimension dictionary, the TFT-FASHD is implemented by CS under multiple measurement vector (MMV) circumstances. The accuracy of the algorithm in non-matching scenario is verified by simulation results. For the matching scenario, compared with the related JAFE methods, the proposed algorithm has a lower computational complexity, smaller detection error, and higher energy efficiency, which are validated through simulation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the rapid development of mobile applications, mobile edge computing (MEC), which provides various cloud resources (e.g., computation and storage resources) closer to mobile and IoT devices for computation offloading, has been broadly studied in both academia and industry. However, due to the limited coverage of static edge servers, the traditional MEC technology performs badly in a nowadays environment. To adapt the diverse demands, in this paper, we propose a novel mobile edge mechanism with a vehicle-mounted edge (V-edge) deployed. Aiming at maximizing completed tasks of V-edge with sensitive deadline, the problem of joint path planning and resource allocation is formulated into a mixed integer nonlinear program (MINLP). By utilizing the piecewise linear approximation and linear relaxation, we transform the MINLP into a mixed integer linear program (MILP). To obtain the near-optimal solution, we further develop a gap-adjusted branch & bound algorithm, also called GA-B&B algorithm. Moreover, we propose a low-complexity $L$ L -step lookahead branch scheme (referred to as $L$ L -step scheme) for efficient scheduling in large-scale scenarios. Extensive evaluations demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed scheme compared with the traditional static edge mechanism. Furthermore, the proposed $L$ L -step scheme achieves close performance to the near-optimal solution, and significantly improves the task completion percentage of state-of-the-art schemes by over 10 percent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An effective way for a Mobile network operator (MNO) to improve its revenue is price discrimination, i.e., providing different combinations of data caps and subscription fees. Rollover data plan (allowing the unused data in the current month to be used in the next month) is an innovative data mechanism with time flexibility. In this paper, we study the MNO's optimal multi-cap data plans with time flexibility in a realistic asymmetric information scenario. Specifically, users are associated with multi-dimensional private information, and the MNO designs a contract (with different data caps and subscription fees) to induce users to truthfully reveal their private information. This problem is quite challenging due to the multi-dimensional private information. We address the challenge in two aspects. First, we find that a feasible contract (satisfying incentive compatibility and individual rationality) should allocate the data caps according to users’ willingness-to-pay (captured by the slopes of users’ indifference curves). Second, for the non-convex data cap allocation problem, we propose a Dynamic Quota Allocation Algorithm, which has a low complexity and guarantees the global optimality. Numerical results show that the time-flexible data mechanisms increase both the MNO's profit (25 percent on average) and users’ payoffs (8.2 percent on average) under price discrimination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Edge devices with sensing, storage, and communication resources (e.g., smartphones, tablets, connected vehicles, and IoT nodes) are increasingly penetrating our daily lives. Many novel applications can be created through sharing data among nearby peer edge devices. In such applications, caching data at some edge devices can greatly improve data availability, retrieval robustness, and delivery latency. In this paper, we study the unique problem of caching fairness in edge computing environments. Due to the heterogeneity of peer edge devices, load balance is a critical issue that affects the fairness in caching. We propose fairness metrics to characterize this issue and formulate the caching fairness problem as an integer linear programming problem, which is shown as the summation of multiple Connected Facility Location (ConFL) problems. We provide an approximation algorithm by leveraging an existing ConFL approximation algorithm, and prove that it preserves a 6.55 approximation ratio. We further develop a distributed algorithm where devices exchange data reachability information and identify popular candidates as caching nodes. Finally, we update the fairness metric and apply it to algorithms for making continuous caching decisions over time. Our extensive evaluation results show that compared with existing caching algorithms for wireless networks, our proposed algorithms significantly improve the data caching fairness while keeping the contention induced latency comparable to the best existing algorithms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, MUSE, an algorithm enabled by backscattering tag-to-tag network (BTTN) is presented to accomplish simultaneous 2-D localization of large-scale (10 m × 10 m) massive (20 $\sim$ ∼ 50) passive UHF RFIDs. In BTTNs, the most intractable problem is the high-frequency loss of range measurements. In a particular case of 30 tags to be located with maximum communication range being 3 m, the rate is nearly up to 85.75 percent. In the proposed framework, we utilize relevant knowledge in the theory of graphs to obtain underlying subsets in which tags can communicate with each other and then assemble them stage by stage to achieve overall localization. Theoretical analysis shows that multistage assembly imparts extraordinary characteristics to MUSE: Assembling rectifies fragment maps given some condition, and in later stages prevents errors flowing down into the next stage. Experimental analysis shows that the condition is easy to satisfy. Furthermore, an analytical expression for the Cramér-Rao lower bound is also derived as a benchmark to evaluate the localization performance. Extensive simulations demonstrate that MUSE outperforms existing algorithms for simultaneous localization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents two efficient broadcasting algorithms based on 1-hop neighbor information. In the first part of the paper, we consider sender-based broadcasting algorithms, specifically the algorithm proposed by Liu et al. In their paper, Liu et al. proposed a sender-based broadcasting algorithm that can achieve local optimality by selecting the minimum number of forwarding nodes in the lowest computational time complexity O(n log n), where n is the number of neighbors. We show that this optimality only holds for a subclass of sender-based algorithms. We propose an efficient sender-based broadcasting algorithm based on 1-hop neighbor information that reduces the time complexity of computing forwarding nodes to O(n). In Liu et al's algorithm, n nodes are selected to forward the message in the worst case, whereas in our proposed algorithm, the number of forwarding nodes in the worst case is 11. In the second part of the paper, we propose a simple and highly efficient receiver-based broadcasting algorithm. When nodes are uniformly distributed, we prove that the probability of two neighbor nodes broadcasting the same message exponentially decreases when the distance between them decreases or when the node density increases. Using simulation, we confirm these results and show that the number of broadcasts in our proposed receiver-based broadcasting algorithm can be even less than one of the best known approximations for the minimum number of required broadcasts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In mobile edge computing, popular mobile applications, such as augmented reality, usually offload their tasks to resource-rich edge servers. The user experience can be considerably affected when many mobile users compete for the limited communication and computation resources. The key technical challenge in task offloading is to guarantee the Quality of Service (QoS) for such applications. Existing work on task offloading focus on deterministic QoS (delay) guarantee, which means that tasks have to complete before the given deadline with 100 percent. However, it is impractical to impose a deterministic QoS guarantee for tasks due to the high dynamics of the wireless environment when offloading to edge servers. In this paper, we focus on task offloading with statistical QoS guarantee (tasks are allowed to complete before a given deadline with a probability above the given threshold), which can further save more energy by loosing the QoS requirement. Specially, we first propose a statistical computation model and a statistical transmission model to quantify the correlation between the statistical QoS guarantee and task offloading strategy. Then, we formulate the task offloading problem as a mixed integer non-Linear programming problem with the statistical delay constraint. We transform the statistical delay constraint into the constraints on CPU cycle numbers and the delay exponent respectively. We propose an algorithm to provide the statistical QoS guarantee for tasks using convex optimization theory and Gibbs sampling method. Experiment results show that the proposed algorithm outperforms the three baselines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Long-term evolution advanced (LTE-A) heterogeneous networks have been observed to offer reliable and service-differentiated communication, thereby enabling numerous mobile applications such as smart meters, remote sensors, and vehicular applications. This fact envisions the trend of Internet of Things (IoT) underlaying heterogeneous small cell networks. On this basis, this paper proposes an energy-efficient framework for such a scenario, where multitier heterogeneous small cell networks provide wireless connection and seamless coverage for mobile users and IoT nodes. In our proposed framework, an elastic cell-zooming algorithm based on the quality of service and traffic loads of end-users is performed by adaptively adjusting the transmission power of small cells in order to reduce energy consumption. In addition, aiming at the high energy efficiency of IoT underlaying small cell networks, a clustering-based IoT structure is used, where a SWIPT-CH selection algorithm is proposed to maximize the average residual energy of IoT nodes and to mitigate resource competition between IoT nodes and mobile users. Extensive simulations demonstrate that our proposed framework can significantly enhance the energy efficiency for IoT underlaying small cell networks with guaranteed outage probability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In mobile crowdsensing, it is a challenge to assign tasks to appropriate smartphones. Existing task allocation mechanisms mainly aim at optimizing the global system performance, while ignoring the personal preferences of individual crowdsensing tasks and smartphone users. Nevertheless, in an open crowdsensing system, a task assignment is prone to be unstable if smartphone users or tasks have incentives to deviate from the global assignment, and seek for alternative choices to improve their own utilities. Besides that, during task competition, the rational smartphone users might choose to adjust their payments after the first few failures, which however, brings new challenges in achieving the stability. To address these issues, this paper constructs a distributed many-to-many matching model to capture the interaction between crowdsensing tasks and smartphone users, taking into account the budget constraints of tasks. Then, we design a stable matching algorithm to allocate the tasks to the users, and determine their payments. We prove that the proposed algorithm achieves several desirable properties including individual rationality, stability, and convergency. It is also proved that the proposed scheme achieves at least half of the optimal system efficiency when each smartphone provides homogeneous service quality. Finally, simulation results confirm the effectiveness of the proposed scheme. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a method for estimating the time of arrival (ToA) of long term evolution (LTE) signals received on multiple separate transmission bands by the same base station (BS) mast. By exploiting the overall bandwidth occupied by the different signals and the correlation between the corresponding channel impulse responses, a higher precision is achieved with respect to the usually adopted single-band approach whenever the time-correlation among the bands is sufficiently high. The ToA estimation is carried out by generalizing the space-alternating generalized expectation-maximization (SAGE) algorithm to the multi-band context, proving that the availability of multiple bands provides a reduced standard deviation for the estimated ToA, with a limited increase of the computational cost. The main analyzed issue consists in the management of the asynchrony between transmitters belonging to distinct cellular operators, which is addressed by developing a suitable method to combine the contributions provided by the different bands. The method is validated by simulations in dual- and tri-band scenarios, and is further applied to real dual-band signals measured through a portable setup and experimentally acquired from an LTE BS mast covering multiple cells. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Multipath TCP (MPTCP) is a promising solution that can provide high end-to-end throughput in fifth generation (5G) mobile networks. Many next-generation applications will require high throughput and low latency simultaneously, but the current MPTCP congestion control algorithms cannot reliably satisfy this requirement. In this paper, a novel MPTCP congestion control scheme named delay-equalized FAST (DEFT) is proposed to achieve high throughput and low end-to-end (E2E) delay in 5G networks. First, in order to achieve high throughput, DEFT includes a novel window control algorithm that shows fast responsiveness when the state of the millimeter-wave (mmWave) link changes from line-of-sight (LOS) to non-LOS (NLOS) and vice versa. Second, in order to achieve low E2E delay, DEFT includes a delay-equalizing algorithm which minimizes additional reordering delay in the receive buffer. The performance of DEFT was evaluated based on ns-3 simulation and was compared with wVegas, Balia, and delay-adapted LIA. Simulation results show that DEFT can provide a significant goodput gain and application-level E2E delay reduction for the range of interest. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recently, robust video transmission system that can eliminate the cliff effect in digital video transmission has attracted great interest from both academia and industry. By linearizing the whole system, robust video transmission is intrinsically scalable to channel conditions in mobile networks. However, the heterogeneity of user devices in terms of viewing resolution has not been well studied for robust video broadcast systems. In this paper, we propose a spatial scalability enabled robust video broadcast (SSRVB) system, aiming at accommodating diverse users with both heterogeneous resolutions and heterogeneous channel conditions. In SSRVB, a novel spatial decomposition method based on linear projection is first designed for robust video transmission. Then the transmission distortion minimization problem with joint subcarrier matching and power allocation is formulated. A near-optimal low-complexity subcarrier matching algorithm based on auction theory and an optimal power allocation strategy are also proposed. Furthermore, an iterative algorithm is designed to solve the problem of joint resource allocation. Simulation results demonstrate that SSRVB can achieve an average of 3 dB gain when compared with the reference schemes (i.e., ECast, MCast, discrete wavelet transform (DWT) based scheme, and scalable video coding (SVC) scheme) in terms of average peak signal-to-noise ratio under heterogeneous scenarios. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Autonomous vehicles become more and more popular in our daily life. Mobile computing schemes to be installed on these vehicles have drawn a lot of recent research interest. In this paper, we address the important path-planning problem for autonomous vehicles. We introduce and formulate the novel paintbrush coverage problem. We present a theoretical study on the minimum trajectory length of a paintbrush to cover an arbitrary convex region, which is derived as a function of the area of the region and the size of the cover. Three commonly-used patrolling/scouting methods, namely boustrophedon, spiral, and sector, are manifested in details as the potential solutions to the paintbrush coverage problem. The theoretical minimum trajectory lengths any algorithm can achieve are also demonstrated as the benchmarks for different shapes of regions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper makes the first effort on proposing a fog computing empowered architecture together with a dedicated scheduling algorithm for data dissemination in software defined heterogeneous vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANETs). Specifically, the architecture supports both the logically centralized control via the cloud node in the core network and the distributed data dissemination via the fog nodes at the network edge. A problem called fog assisted cooperative service (FACS) is formulated, which takes network coding and vehicular caching into consideration, and aims at minimizing the overall service delay via the cooperation of vehicle-to-cloud (V2C), vehicle-to-fog (V2F) and vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communications. Further, we derive an equivalence problem of FACS and prove that FACS is NP-hard. On this basis, we propose a Clique Searching based Scheduling (CSS) algorithm at the SDN controller, which considers the heterogeneous communication interfaces and vehicle mobility in scheduling, and enables the collaborative data encoding and transmission among the cloud, fog nodes and vehicles. The complexity analysis demonstrates the feasibility of the proposed algorithm. Finally, we build the simulation model and give a comprehensive performance evaluation based on real vehicular trajectories extracted from different time and space. The simulation results conclusively demonstrate the superiority of the proposed solution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Complementing traditional cellular networks with the option of integrated small cells and WiFi access points can be used to further boost the overall traffic capacity and service level. Small cells along with WiFi access points are projected to carry over 60 percent of all theglobal data traffic by 2015. With the integration of small cells on the radio access network levels, there is a focus on providing operators with more control over small cell selection while reducing the feedback burden. Altogether, these issues motivate the need for innovative distributed and autonomous association policies that operate on each user under the network operator’s control, utilizing only partial information, yet achieving near-optimal solutions for the network. In this paper, we propose a load-aware network selection approach applied to automated dynamic offset in heterogeneous networks (HetNets). In particular, we investigate the properties of a hierarchical (Stackelberg) Bayesian game framework, in which the macro cell dynamically chooses the offset about the state of the channel in order to guide users to perform intelligent network selection decisions between macro cell and small cell networks. We derive analytically the utility related to the channel quality perceived by users to obtain the equilibria, and compare it to the fully centralized (optimal), the full channel state information and the non-cooperative (autonomous) models. Building upon these results, we effectively address the problem of how to intelligently configure a dynamic offset which optimizes network’s global utility while users maximize their individual utilities. One of the technical contributions of the paper lies in obtaining explicit characterizations of the dynamic offset at the equilibrium and the related performances in terms of the price of anarchy. Interestingly, it turns out that the complexity of the algorithm for finding the dynamic offset of the Stackelberg model is \mathcal O(n^4) (where $n$ is the number of users). It is shown that the proposed hierarchical mechanism keeps the price of anarchy almost equal to $1$ even for a low number of users, and remains bounded above by the non-cooperative model. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Maintaining efficiency and fairness is a challenging problem in distributed systems and networks. In this paper, we focus on distributed multi-server systems and networks in which each user may be allocated resources by different servers. Reemphasizing polling systems as abstractions of resource sharing systems, in this paper, first we introduce a multi-server polling system in which each server (resource) can poll (be allocated to) only a subset of queues (users) in the system to model a wide range of multi-server systems such as multihomed networks and cloud computing. Then, to obtain a fair resource allocation vector to queues, a network utility maximization problem with a general utility function is defined. Depending on the type of the utility function, the presented scheme can attain different kinds of fairness such as weighted proportional and max-min fairness. Although maintaining fairness is important in many applications, providing efficiency is also crucial. Hence, we present an efficient algorithm to convert the obtained fair resource allocation vector into a Markovian routing matrix to determine the polling order of queues. This algorithm is capable of improving performance measures such as delay variance and mitigating short-term unfairness by minimizing the probability of consecutive polling of the same queue. Two distributed schemes are presented to obtain fairness and efficiency in even highly dynamic and distributed environments. The effectiveness of the presented schemes is also studied through simulation and numerical evaluation. Our results show their success in attaining fairness and efficiency in dynamic multi-server distributed systems and networks. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Recent years have seen rising needs for location-based services in our everyday life. Aside from the many advantages provided by these services, they have caused serious concerns regarding the location privacy of users. Adversaries can monitor the queried locations by users to infer sensitive information, such as home addresses and shopping habits. To address this issue, dummy-based algorithms have been developed to increase the anonymity of users, and thus, protecting their privacy. Unfortunately, the existing algorithms only assume a limited amount of side information known by adversaries, which may face more severe challenges in practice. In this paper, we develop an attack model termed as Viterbi attack, which represents a realistic privacy threat on user trajectories. Moreover, we propose a metric called transition entropy that enables the evaluation of dummy-based algorithms, followed by developing a robust algorithm that can defend users against the Viterbi attack while maintaining significantly high performance in terms of the traditional metrics. We compare and evaluate our proposed algorithm and metric on a publicly available dataset published by Microsoft, i.e., Geolife dataset. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In mobile crowdsensing, finding the best match between tasks and users is crucial to ensure both the quality and effectiveness of a crowdsensing system. Existing works usually assume a centralized task assignment by the crowdsensing platform, without addressing the need of fine-grained personalized task matching. In this paper, we argue that it is essential to match tasks to users based on a careful characterization of both the users’ preference and reliability. To that end, we propose a personalized task recommender system for mobile crowdsensing, which recommends tasks to users based on a recommendation score that jointly takes each user’s preference and reliability into consideration. We first present a hybrid preference metric to characterize users’ preference by exploiting their implicit feedback. Then, to profile users’ reliability levels, we formalize the problem as a semi-supervised learning model, and propose an efficient block coordinate descent algorithm to solve the problem. For some tasks that lack users’ historical information, we further propose a matrix factorization method to infer the users’ reliability levels on those tasks. We conduct extensive experiments to evaluate the performance of our system, and the evaluation results demonstrate that our system can achieve superior performance to the benchmarks in both user profiling and personalized task recommendation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rapid growth of mobile traffic has heavily overloaded the cellular networks, making it increasingly desirable to offload mobile users’ (MUs’) traffic to small-cell networks. In this paper, we study the MUs’ optimal uplink traffic offloading scheme based on the new paradigm of small-cell dual-connectivity (DC). Through DC, an MU can flexibly schedule its traffic between a macro-cell base station (BS) and a small-cell access point (AP) via two different radio interfaces. To optimize the overall network radio resource usage, we jointly optimize the BS’ bandwidth allocation as well as the MUs’ traffic scheduling and power allocation. Specifically, for reducing the bandwidth usage, the BS prefers to allocate the MUs small amount of bandwidth to encourage the MUs to utilize the small-cell networks. However, excessive traffic offloading can lead to severe interferences among MUs, which increase the MUs’ power consumption. Hence, our joint optimization strikes a proper balance between these two aspects. Despite the non-convexity of the proposed joint optimization problem, we propose an efficient algorithm to compute the optimal offloading solution. The key idea is to exploit the layered-structure of the joint optimization problem, and decompose it into the BS’ bandwidth allocation problem (on the top-level) and the MUs’ traffic scheduling and power allocation problem (as a subproblem). Such a decomposition enables us to exploit the hidden convexity of the MUs’ problem and the monotonic structure of the BS’ problem for an effective algorithm design. Numerical results show that our proposed algorithm can achieve the global optimum solution with significantly reduced computational time. Moreover, the proposed traffic offloading scheme can significantly reduce the overall system cost, in comparison with using the fixed bandwidth allocation or traffic scheduling schemes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mobile edge caching/computing (MEC) has been emerging as a promising paradigm to provide ultra-high rate, ultra-reliable, and/or low-latency communications in future wireless networks. In this paper, we introduce a novel MEC network architecture that leverages the optimal joint caching-delivering with horizontal cooperation among mobile edge nodes (MENs). To that end, we first formulate the content-access delay minimization problem by jointly optimizing the content caching and delivering decisions under various network constraints (e.g., network topology, storage capacity and users’ demands at each MEN). However, the strongly mutual dependency between the decisions makes the problem a nested dual optimization that is proved to be NP-hard. To deal with it, we propose a novel transformation method to transform the nested dual problem to an equivalent mixed-integer nonlinear programming (MINLP) optimization problem. Then, we design a centralized solution using an improved branch-and-bound algorithm with the interior-point method to find the joint caching and delivering policy which is within 1 percent of the optimal solution. Since the centralized solution requires the full network topology and information from all MENs, to make our solution scalable, we develop a distributed algorithm which allows each MEN to make its own decisions based on its local observations. Extensive simulations demonstrate that the proposed solutions can reduce the total average delay for the whole network up to 40 percent compared with other current caching policies. Furthermore, the proposed solutions also increase the cache hit ratio for the network up to 4 times, thereby dramatically reducing the traffic load on the backhaul network. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For slotted random access systems with a single channel, the slotted ALOHA (S-ALOHA) protocol shows 0.368 (packets/slot) as the maximum throughput, whereas some splitting (or tree) algorithms exhibit 0.487 (packets/slot). The S-ALOHA protocol has been widely adopted even for multi-channel systems such as Long-Term Evolution (LTE), as it is more practically implementable. However, the throughput of each channel in multi-channel S-ALOHA is limited to 0.368. In order to overcome this limit and some implementational drawbacks of the existing splitting algorithms, this paper proposes a novel splitting algorithm for multi-channel slotted systems which can also adapt to dynamic system situations through estimating the number of users who have packet to transmit. We analyze the throughput of our proposed algorithm and show that the proposed algorithm is more practical than the first-come first-serve (FCFS) algorithm and shows smaller access delay than the FCFS algorithm even for a single channel system. For M-channel systems, the proposed algorithm yields the maximum throughput of 0.487M. Extensive simulations validate our analytical results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Device-to-Device (D2D) communications incorporated with content caching have been regarded as a promising way to offload the cellular traffic data. In this paper, the caching strategy is investigated to maximize the D2D offloading gain with the comprehensive consideration of user collaborative characteristics as well as the physical transmission conditions. Specifically, for a given content, the number of interested users in different groups is different, and users always ask the most trustworthy user in proximity for D2D transmissions. An analytical expression of the D2D success probability is first derived, which represents the probability that the received signal to interference ratio is no less than a given threshold. As the formulated problem is nonconvex, the optimal caching strategy for the special unbiased case is derived in a closed form, and a numerical searching algorithm is proposed to obtain the globally optimal solution for the general case. To reduce the computational complexity, an iterative algorithm based on the asymptotic approximation of the D2D success probability is proposed to obtain the solution that satisfies the Karush-Kuhn-Tucker conditions. The simulation results verify the effectiveness of the analytical results and show that the proposed algorithm outperforms the existing schemes in terms of offloading gain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Network slicing allows different applications and network services to be deployed on virtualized resources running on a common underlying physical infrastructure. Developing a scalable system for the orchestration of end-to-end (E2E) mobile network slices requires careful planning and very reliable algorithms. In this paper, we propose a novel E2E Network Slicing Orchestration System (NSOS) and a Dynamic Auto-Scaling Algorithm (DASA) for it. Our NSOS relies strongly on the foundation of a hierarchical architecture that incorporates dedicated entities per domain to manage every segment of the mobile network from the access, to the transport and core network part for a scalable orchestration of federated network slices. The DASA enables the NSOS to autonomously adapt its resources to changes in the demand for slice orchestration requests (SORs) while enforcing a given mean overall time taken by the NSOS to process any SOR. The proposed DASA includes both proactive and reactive resource provisioning techniques. The proposed resource dimensioning heuristic algorithm of the DASA is based on a queuing model for the NSOS, which consists of an open network of G/G/m queues. Finally, we validate the proper operation and evaluate the performance of our DASA solution for the NSOS by means of system-level simulations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We consider a multichannel Cognitive Radio Network (CRN), where secondary users sequentially sense channels for opportunistic spectrum access. In this scenario, the Channel Selection Algorithm (CSA) allows secondary users to find a vacant channel with the minimal number of channel switches. Most of the existing CSA literature assumes exponential ON-OFF time distribution for primary user's (PU) channel occupancy pattern. This exponential assumption might be helpful to get performance bounds; but not useful to evaluate the performance of CSA under realistic conditions. An in-depth analysis of independent spectrum measurement traces reveals that wireless channels have typically heavy-tailed PU OFF times. In this paper, we propose an extension to the Predictive CSA framework and its generalization for heavy tailed PU OFF time distribution, which represents realistic scenarios. In particular, we calculate the probability of channel being idle for hyper-exponential OFF times to use in CSA. We implement our proposed CSA framework in a wireless test-bed and comprehensively evaluate its performance by recreating the realistic PU channel occupancy patterns. The proposed CSA shows significant reduction in channel switches and energy consumption as compared to Predictive CSA which always assumes exponential PU ON-OFF times. Through our work, we show the impact of the PU channel occupancy pattern on the performance of CSA in multichannel CRN. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Good deployment of sensors empowers the network with effective monitoring ability. Different from omnidirectional sensors, the coverage region of a directional sensor is determined by not only the sensing radius (distance), but also its sensing orientation and spread angle. Heterogeneous sensing distances and spread angles are likely to exist among directional sensors, to which we refer as heterogeneous directional sensors. In this paper, we target on a bounded monitoring area and deal with heterogeneous directional sensors equipped with locomotion and rotation facilities to enable the sensors self-deployment. Two Enhanced Deployment A lgorithms, EDA-I and EDA-II, are proposed to achieve high sensing coverage ratio in the monitored field. EDA-I leverages the concept of virtual forces (for sensors movements) and virtual boundary torques (for sensors rotations), whereas EDA-II combines Voronoi diagram directed movements and boundary torques guided rotations. EDA-I computations can be centralized or distributed that differ in required energy and execution time, whereas EDA-II only allows centralized calculations. Our EDA-II outperforms EDA-I in centralized operations, while EDA-I can be adapted into a distributed deployment algorithm without requiring global information and still achieves comparably good coverage performance to its centralized version. To the best of our knowledge, this is perhaps the first work to employ movements followed by rotations for sensors self-deployment. Performance results demonstrate that our enhanced deployment mechanisms are capable of providing desirable surveillance level, while consuming moderate moving and rotating energy under reasonable execution time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Linear estimators have been extensively utilized for wireless location estimation for their simplicity and closed form property. In the paper, the class of linear estimator by introducing an additional variable, e.g., the well-adopted linear least squares (LLS) estimator, is discussed. There exists information loss from the linearization of location estimator to the nonlinear location estimation, which prevents the linear estimator from approaching the Cramér-Rao lower bound (CRLB). The linearized location estimation problem-based CRLB (L-CRLB) is derived in this paper to provide a portrayal that can fully characterize the behavior for this type of linearized location estimator. The relationships between the proposed L-CRLB and the conventional CRLB are obtained and theoretically proven in this paper. As suggested by the L-CRLB, higher estimation accuracy can be achieved if the mobile station (MS) is located inside the convex hull of the base stations (BSs) compared to the case that the MS is situated outside of the geometric layout. This result motivates the proposal of geometry-assisted localization (GAL) algorithm in order to consider the geometric effect associated with the linearization loss. Based on the initial estimation, the GAL algorithm fictitiously moves the BSs based on the L-CRLB criteria. Two different implementations, including the GAL with two-step least squares estimator (GAL-TSLS) and the GAL with Kalman filter (GAL-KF), are proposed to consider the situations with and without the adoption of MS's historical estimation. Simulation results show that the GAL-KF scheme can compensate the linearization loss and improve the performance of conventional location estimators. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Existing work on placing additional relay nodes in wireless sensor networks to improve network connectivity typically assumes homogeneous wireless sensor nodes with an identical transmission radius. In contrast, this paper addresses the problem of deploying relay nodes to provide fault tolerance with higher network connectivity in heterogeneous wireless sensor networks, where sensor nodes possess different transmission radii. Depending on the level of desired fault tolerance, such problems can be categorized as: 1) full fault-tolerant relay node placement, which aims to deploy a minimum number of relay nodes to establish κ(κ≥1) vertex-disjoint paths between every pair of sensor and/or relay nodes and 2) partial fault-tolerant relay node placement, which aims to deploy a minimum number of relay nodes to establish κ(κ≥1) vertex-disjoint paths only between every pair of sensor nodes. Due to the different transmission radii of sensor nodes, these problems are further complicated by the existence of two different kinds of communication paths in heterogeneous wireless sensor networks, namely, two-way paths, along which wireless communications exist in both directions; and one-way paths, along which wireless communications exist in only one direction. Assuming that sensor nodes have different transmission radii, while relay nodes use the same transmission radius, this paper comprehensively analyzes the range of problems introduced by the different levels of fault tolerance (full or partial) coupled with the different types of path (one-way or two-way). Since each of these problems is NP-hard, we develop O(σκ2-approximation algorithms for both one-way and two-way partial fault-tolerant relay node placement, as well as O(σκ3-approximation algorithms for both one-way and two-way full fault-tolerant relay node placement (σ is the best performance ratio of existing approximation algorithms for finding a minimum κ-vertex connected spanning graph). To facilitate the applications in higher dimensions, we also extend these algorithms and derive their performance ratios in d-dimensional heterogeneous wireless sensor networks (d ≥3). Finally, heuristic implementations of these algorithms are evaluated via QualNet simulations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The increasing popularity of drones is bringing many public security and privacy breach issues, such as smuggling, intrusion, and illegal surveillance. Traditional approaches to detecting and localizing drones such as radar and computer vision incur high costs and hence are not desirable for large-scale applications. In this paper, we propose a cost-effective crowdsensing system named CEDAR to achieve such a goal. Specifically, we introduce a novel way of detecting drones by smartphones, exploiting the fact that most drones adopt Wi-Fi for communications with ground control stations. We design an efficient detection algorithm that takes advantage of historical Wi-Fi beacon information and MAC address encoding mechanisms used by drone manufacturers. Using received signal strength, we can also localize the detected drones. Further, to encourage participants’ involvement, we design an incentive mechanism based on online auction that guarantees truthfulness and consumer sovereignty. CEDAR can be directly applied to multiple drone scenarios. We implement the system based on Android for the client and Spring, Spring MVC, and Mybatis (SSM) for the centralized platform that supports scalability and hierarchical structure, and enables the coordination between clients and the platform. We perform extensive experiments to validate our analysis. Particularly, the detection rate in the experiments reaches 86.7 percent even without any prior information about drones. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Computation offloading over fog computing has the potential to improve reliability and reduce latency in future networks. This paper considers a scenario where roadside units (RSUs) are installed for offloading tasks to the computation nodes including nearby fog nodes and a cloud center. To guarantee the reliable communication, we formulate the first subproblem of power allocation, and leverage the conditional value-at-risk approach to analyze the successful transmission probability in the worse-case channel condition. To complete computation tasks with low latency, we formulate the second subproblem of task allocation into a multi-period generalized assignment problem (MPGAP), which aims at minimizing the total delay by offloading tasks to the ‘right’ fog nodes at ‘right’ period. Then, we propose a modified branch-and-bound algorithm to derive the optimal solution and a heuristic greedy algorithm to obtain approximate performance. In addition, the master problem is proposed as a non-convex optimization problem, which considers both the reliability-guaranteed and delay-sensitive requirements. We design the Lagreedy algorithm by combining the subgradient algorithm and the heuristic algorithm. Comprehensive evaluations demonstrate that the Lagreedy is able to obtain the shortest delay with a high power consumption, while the branch-and-bound algorithm can achieve both shorter delay and lower power consumption with reliability guarantees. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In an offload-capable Long Term Evolution (LTE)- Wireless Fidelity (WiFi) Heterogeneous Network (HetNet), we consider the problem of maximization of the total system throughput under voice user blocking probability constraint. The optimal policy is threshold in nature. However, computation of optimal policy requires the knowledge of the statistics of system dynamics, viz., arrival processes of voice and data users, which may be difficult to obtain in reality. Motivated by the Post-Decision State (PDS) framework to learn the optimal policy under unknown statistics of system dynamics, we propose, in this paper, an online Radio Access Technology (RAT) selection algorithm using Relative Value Iteration Algorithm (RVIA). However, the convergence speed of this algorithm can be further improved if the underlying threshold structure of the optimal policy can be exploited. To this end, we propose a novel structure-aware online RAT selection algorithm which reduces the feasible policy space, thereby offering lesser storage and computational complexity and faster convergence. This algorithm provides a novel framework for designing online learning algorithms for other problems and hence is of independent interest. We prove that both the algorithms converge to the optimal policy. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed algorithms converge faster than a traditional scheme. Also, the proposed schemes perform better than other benchmark algorithms under realistic network scenarios. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we consider wireless ad hoc networks that use adaptive antennas and have limited energy resources. To explore the advantages of power saving offered by the use of adaptive antennas, we consider the case of source initiated multicast traffic. We present a constraint formulation for the MEM (Minimum-Energy Multicast) problem in terms of MILP (Mixed Integer Linear Programming) for wireless ad hoc networks. An optimal solution to the MEM problem using our MILP model can always be obtained in a timely manner for moderately sized networks. In addition to the theoretical effort, we also present two polynomial-time heuristic algorithms called RB-MIDP and D-MIDP to handle larger networks for which the MILP model may not be computationally efficient. The experimental results show that our algorithms compare well with other proposals discussed in this paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]