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A significant challenge for computation offloading in wireless multi-hop networks is the complex interaction among traffic flows in the presence of interference. Existing approaches often ignore these key effects and/or rely on outdated queueing and channel state information. To fill these gaps, we reformulate joint offloading and routing as a routing problem on an extended graph with physical and virtual links. We adopt the state-of-the-art shortest path-biased Backpressure routing algorithm, which allows the destination and the route of a job to be dynamically adjusted at every time step based on network-wide long-term information and real-time states of local neighborhoods. In large networks, our approach achieves smaller makespan than existing approaches, such as separated Backpressure offloading and joint offloading and routing based on linear programming., Comment: 5 pages, 7 figures, accepted to IEEE ICASSP 2025

A mixture of streaming and short-lived traffic presents a common yet challenging scenario for Backpressure routing in wireless multi-hop networks. Although state-of-the-art shortest-path biased backpressure (SP-BP) can significantly improve the latency of backpressure routing while retaining throughput optimality, it still suffers from the last-packet problem due to its inherent per-commodity queue structure and link capacity assignment. To address this challenge, we propose Ant Backpressure (Ant-BP), a fully distributed routing scheme that incorporates the multi-path routing capability of SP-BP into ant colony optimization (ACO) routing, which allows packets of different commodities to share link capacity in a first-in-first-out (FIFO) manner. Numerical evaluations show that Ant-BP can improve the latency and delivery ratio over SP-BP and ACO routing schemes, while achieving the same throughput of SP-BP under low-to-medium traffic loads.

To reduce the latency of Backpressure (BP) routing in wireless multi-hop networks, we propose to enhance the existing shortest path-biased BP (SP-BP) and sojourn time-based backlog metrics, since they introduce no additional time step-wise signaling overhead to the basic BP. Rather than relying on hop-distance, we introduce a new edge-weighted shortest path bias built on the scheduling duty cycle of wireless links, which can be predicted by a graph convolutional neural network based on the topology and traffic of wireless networks. Additionally, we tackle three long-standing challenges associated with SP-BP: optimal bias scaling, efficient bias maintenance, and integration of delay awareness. Our proposed solutions inherit the throughput optimality of the basic BP, as well as its practical advantages of low complexity and fully distributed implementation. Our approaches rely on common link features and introduces only a one-time constant overhead to previous SP-BP schemes, or a one-time overhead linear in the network size to the basic BP. Numerical experiments show that our solutions can effectively address the major drawbacks of slow startup, random walk, and the last packet problem in basic BP, improving the end-to-end delay of existing low-overhead BP algorithms under various settings of network traffic, interference, and mobility., Comment: 16 pages, 15 figures, accepted for publication in IEEE Transactions on Machine Learning in Communications and Networking. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:2310.04364, arXiv:2211.10748

We propose a learning-based framework for efficient power allocation in ad hoc interference networks under episodic constraints. The problem of optimal power allocation -- for maximizing a given network utility metric -- under instantaneous constraints has recently gained significant popularity. Several learnable algorithms have been proposed to obtain fast, effective, and near-optimal performance. However, a more realistic scenario arises when the utility metric has to be optimized for an entire episode under time-coupled constraints. In this case, the instantaneous power needs to be regulated so that the given utility can be optimized over an entire sequence of wireless network realizations while satisfying the constraint at all times. Solving each instance independently will be myopic as the long-term constraint cannot modulate such a solution. Instead, we frame this as a constrained and sequential decision-making problem, and employ an actor-critic algorithm to obtain the constraint-aware power allocation at each step. We present experimental analyses to illustrate the effectiveness of our method in terms of superior episodic network-utility performance and its efficiency in terms of time and computational complexity., Comment: ASILOMAR 2023

Backpressure (BP) routing is a well-established framework for distributed routing and scheduling in wireless multi-hop networks. However, the basic BP scheme suffers from poor end-to-end delay due to the drawbacks of slow startup, random walk, and the last packet problem. Biased BP with shortest path awareness can address the first two drawbacks, and sojourn time-based backlog metrics were proposed for the last packet problem. Furthermore, these BP variations require no additional signaling overhead in each time step compared to the basic BP. In this work, we further address three long-standing challenges associated with the aforementioned low-cost BP variations, including optimal scaling of the biases, bias maintenance under mobility, and incorporating sojourn time awareness into biased BP. Our analysis and experimental results show that proper scaling of biases can be achieved with the help of common link features, which can effectively reduce end-to-end delay of BP by mitigating the random walk of packets under low-to-medium traffic, including the last packet scenario. In addition, our low-overhead bias maintenance scheme is shown to be effective under mobility, and our bio-inspired sojourn time-aware backlog metric is demonstrated to be more efficient and effective for the last packet problem than existing approaches when incorporated into biased BP., Comment: 5 pages, 5 figures, accepted to IEEE CAMSAP 2023. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:2211.10748

Network digital twins (NDTs) facilitate the estimation of key performance indicators (KPIs) before physically implementing a network, thereby enabling efficient optimization of the network configuration. In this paper, we propose a learning-based NDT for network simulators. The proposed method offers a holistic representation of information flow in a wireless network by integrating node, edge, and path embeddings. Through this approach, the model is trained to map the network configuration to KPIs in a single forward pass. Hence, it offers a more efficient alternative to traditional simulation-based methods, thus allowing for rapid experimentation and optimization. Our proposed method has been extensively tested through comprehensive experimentation in various scenarios, including wired and wireless networks. Results show that it outperforms baseline learning models in terms of accuracy and robustness. Moreover, our approach achieves comparable performance to simulators but with significantly higher computational efficiency.

Predicting the throughput of WLAN deployments is a classic problem that occurs in the design of robust and high performance WLAN systems. However, due to the increasingly complex communication protocols and the increase in interference between devices in denser and denser WLAN deployments, traditional methods either have substantial runtime or enormous prediction error and hence cannot be applied in downstream tasks. Recently, Graph Neural Networks have been proven to be powerful graph analytic models and have been broadly applied to various networking problems such as link scheduling and power allocation. In this work, we propose HTNet, a specialized Heterogeneous Temporal Graph Neural Network that extracts features from dynamic WLAN deployments. Analyzing the unique graph structure of WLAN deployment graphs, we show that HTNet achieves the maximum expressive power on each snapshot. Based on a powerful message passing scheme, HTNet requires fewer number of layers compared with other GNN-based methods which entails less supporting data and runtime. To evaluate the performance of HTNet, we prepare six different setups with more than five thousands dense dynamic WLAN deployments that cover a wide range of real-world scenarios. HTNet achieves the lowest prediction error on all six setups with an average improvement of 25.3\% over the state-of-the-art methods., Comment: InfoCom'23

We propose a data-driven approach for power allocation in the context of federated learning (FL) over interference-limited wireless networks. The power policy is designed to maximize the transmitted information during the FL process under communication constraints, with the ultimate objective of improving the accuracy and efficiency of the global FL model being trained. The proposed power allocation policy is parameterized using a graph convolutional network and the associated constrained optimization problem is solved through a primal-dual algorithm. Numerical experiments show that the proposed method outperforms three baseline methods in both transmission success rate and FL global performance.

This is a technical report, containing all the lemma and proposition proofs in paper "Topological Constraints on Identifying Additive Link Metrics via End-to-end Paths Measurements" by Liang Ma, Ting He, Kin K. Leung, Don Towsley, and Ananthram Swami, published in Annual Conference of The International Technology Alliance (ACITA), 2012., Comment: arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:2012.12190

This is a technical report, containing all the theorem proofs and additional evaluations in paper "Efficient Identification of Additive Link Metrics via Network Tomography" by Liang Ma, Ting He, Kin K. Leung, Don Towsley, and Ananthram Swami, published in IEEE ICDCS, 2013.

This is a technical report, containing all the theorem proofs in the following two papers: (1) Liang Ma, Ting He, Kin K. Leung, Ananthram Swami, and Don Towsley, "Identifiability of Link Metrics Based on End-to-end Path Measurements," in ACM IMC, 2013. (2) Liang Ma, Ting He, Kin K. Leung, Ananthram Swami, and Don Towsley, "Inferring Link Metrics from End-to-end Path Measurements: Identifiability and Monitor Placement," IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, vol. 22, no. 4, pp. 1351-1368, 2014., Comment: References are updated

This is a technical report, containing all the theorem proofs and additional evaluations in paper "Monitor Placement for Maximal Identifiability in Network Tomography" by Liang Ma, Ting He, Kin K. Leung, Ananthram Swami, Don Towsley, published in IEEE INFOCOM, 2014.

This is a technical report, containing all the theorem proofs in paper "Link Identifiability in Communication Networks with Two Monitors" by Liang Ma, Ting He, Kin K. Leung, Ananthram Swami, and Don Towsley, published in IEEE Globecom, 2013., Comment: Auxiliary algorithms are removed from this report as they exist in the main (IEEE Globecom'13) paper. arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:2012.11378

This is a technical report, containing all the theorem proofs in paper "Node Failure Localization in Communication Networks via Network Tomography" by Liang Ma, Ting He, Ananthram Swami, Don Towsley, Kin K. Leung, and Jessica Lowe, published in ITA Annual Fall Meeting, 2014., Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:2012.09959

This is a technical report, containing all the theorem proofs and additional evaluations in paper "Network Capability in Localizing Node Failures via End-to-end Path Measurements" by Liang Ma, Ting He, Ananthram Swami, Don Towsley, and Kin K. Leung, published in IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, vol. 25, no. 1, pp. 434-450, 2017., Comment: Updated references

This is a technical report, containing all the theorem proofs in paper "On Optimal Monitor Placement for Localizing Node Failures via Network Tomography" by Liang Ma, Ting He, Ananthram Swami, Don Towsley, and Kin K. Leung, published in IFIP WG 7.3 Performance, 2015.

We consider a class of power of two choice based assignment policies for allocating users to servers, where both users and servers are located on a two-dimensional Euclidean plane. In this framework, we investigate the inherent tradeoff between the communication cost, and load balancing performance of different allocation policies. To this end, we first design and evaluate a Spatial Power of two (sPOT) policy in which each user is allocated to the least loaded server among its two geographically nearest servers sequentially. When servers are placed on a two-dimensional square grid, sPOT maps to the classical Power of two (POT) policy on the Delaunay graph associated with the Voronoi tessellation of the set of servers. We show that the associated Delaunay graph is 4-regular and provide expressions for asymptotic maximum load using results from the literature. For uniform placement of servers, we map sPOT to a classical balls and bins allocation policy with bins corresponding to the Voronoi regions associated with the second order Voronoi diagram of the set of servers. We provide expressions for the lower bound on the asymptotic expected maximum load on the servers and prove that sPOT does not achieve POT load balancing benefits. However, experimental results suggest the efficacy of sPOT with respect to expected communication cost. Finally, we propose two non-uniform server sampling based POT policies that achieve the best of both the performance metrics. Experimental results validate the effctiveness of our proposed policies.

As Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) middleboxes become increasingly popular, a spectrum of adversarial attacks have emerged with the goal of evading such middleboxes. Many of these attacks exploit discrepancies between the middlebox network protocol implementations, and the more rigorous/complete versions implemented at end hosts. These evasion attacks largely involve subtle manipulations of packets to cause different behaviours at DPI and end hosts, to cloak malicious network traffic that is otherwise detectable. With recent automated discovery, it has become prohibitively challenging to manually curate rules for detecting these manipulations. In this work, we propose CLAP, the first fully-automated, unsupervised ML solution to accurately detect and localize DPI evasion attacks. By learning what we call the packet context, which essentially captures inter-relationships across both (1) different packets in a connection; and (2) different header fields within each packet, from benign traffic traces only, CLAP can detect and pinpoint packets that violate the benign packet contexts (which are the ones that are specially crafted for evasion purposes). Our evaluations with 73 state-of-the-art DPI evasion attacks show that CLAP achieves an Area Under the Receiver Operating Characteristic Curve (AUC-ROC) of 0.963, an Equal Error Rate (EER) of only 0.061 in detection, and an accuracy of 94.6% in localization. These results suggest that CLAP can be a promising tool for thwarting DPI evasion attacks., Comment: 12 pages, 12 figures; accepted to ACM CoNEXT 2020

Many tasks regarding the monitoring, management, and design of communication networks rely on knowledge of the routing topology. However, the standard approach to topology mapping--namely, active probing with traceroutes--relies on cooperation from increasingly non-cooperative routers, leading to missing information. Network tomography, which uses end-to-end measurements of additive link metrics (like delays or log packet loss rates) across monitor paths, is a possible remedy. Network tomography does not require that routers cooperate with traceroute probes, and it has already been used to infer the structure of multicast trees. This paper goes a step further. We provide a tomographic method to infer the underlying routing topology of an arbitrary set of monitor paths using the joint distribution of end-to-end measurements, without making any assumptions on routing behavior. Our approach, called the M\"obius Inference Algorithm (MIA), uses cumulants of this distribution to quantify high-order interactions among monitor paths, and it applies M\"obius inversion to "disentangle" these interactions. In addition to MIA, we provide a more practical variant called Sparse M\"obius Inference, which uses various sparsity heuristics to reduce the number and order of cumulants required to be estimated. We show the viability of our approach using synthetic case studies based on real-world ISP topologies.

The growing demand for edge computing resources, particularly due to increasing popularity of Internet of Things (IoT), and distributed machine/deep learning applications poses a significant challenge. On the one hand, certain edge service providers (ESPs) may not have sufficient resources to satisfy their applications according to the associated service-level agreements. On the other hand, some ESPs may have additional unused resources. In this paper, we propose a resource-sharing framework that allows different ESPs to optimally utilize their resources and improve the satisfaction level of applications subject to constraints such as communication cost for sharing resources across ESPs. Our framework considers that different ESPs have their own objectives for utilizing their resources, thus resulting in a multi-objective optimization problem. We present an $N$-person \emph{Nash Bargaining Solution} (NBS) for resource allocation and sharing among ESPs with \emph{Pareto} optimality guarantee. Furthermore, we propose a \emph{distributed}, primal-dual algorithm to obtain the NBS by proving that the strong-duality property holds for the resultant resource sharing optimization problem. Using synthetic and real-world data traces, we show numerically that the proposed NBS based framework not only enhances the ability to satisfy applications' resource demands, but also improves utilities of different ESPs., Comment: This work has been submitted to the IEEE for possible publication

Mobile edge computing seeks to provide resources to different delay-sensitive applications. This is a challenging problem as an edge cloud-service provider may not have sufficient resources to satisfy all resource requests. Furthermore, allocating available resources optimally to different applications is also challenging. Resource sharing among different edge cloud-service providers can address the aforementioned limitation as certain service providers may have resources available that can be ``rented'' by other service providers. However, edge cloud service providers can have different objectives or \emph{utilities}. Therefore, there is a need for an efficient and effective mechanism to share resources among service providers, while considering the different objectives of various providers. We model resource sharing as a multi-objective optimization problem and present a solution framework based on \emph{Cooperative Game Theory} (CGT). We consider the strategy where each service provider allocates resources to its native applications first and shares the remaining resources with applications from other service providers. We prove that for a monotonic, non-decreasing utility function, the game is canonical and convex. Hence, the \emph{core} is not empty and the grand coalition is stable. We propose two algorithms \emph{Game-theoretic Pareto optimal allocation} (GPOA) and \emph{Polyandrous-Polygamous Matching based Pareto Optimal Allocation} (PPMPOA) that provide allocations from the core. Hence the obtained allocations are \emph{Pareto} optimal and the grand coalition of all the service providers is stable. Experimental results confirm that our proposed resource sharing framework improves utilities of edge cloud-service providers and application request satisfaction., Comment: The paper is currently under review in IEEE Transactions on Network and Service Management

In distributed software-defined networks (SDN), multiple physical SDN controllers, each managing a network domain, are implemented to balance centralised control, scalability, and reliability requirements. In such networking paradigms, controllers synchronize with each other, in attempts to maintain a logically centralised network view. Despite the presence of various design proposals for distributed SDN controller architectures, most existing works only aim at eliminating anomalies arising from the inconsistencies in different controllers' network views. However, the performance aspect of controller synchronization designs with respect to given SDN applications are generally missing. To fill this gap, we formulate the controller synchronization problem as a Markov decision process (MDP) and apply reinforcement learning techniques combined with deep neural networks (DNNs) to train a smart, scalable, and fine-grained controller synchronization policy, called the Multi-Armed Cooperative Synchronization (MACS), whose goal is to maximise the performance enhancements brought by controller synchronizations. Evaluation results confirm the DNN's exceptional ability in abstracting latent patterns in the distributed SDN environment, rendering significant superiority to MACS-based synchronization policy, which are 56% and 30% performance improvements over ONOS and greedy SDN controller synchronization heuristics., Comment: Published as a conference paper at ICNP 2019

Providing resources to different users or applications is fundamental to cloud computing. This is a challenging problem as a cloud service provider may have insufficient resources to satisfy all user requests. Furthermore, allocating available resources optimally to different applications is also challenging. Resource sharing among different cloud service providers can improve resource availability and resource utilization as certain cloud service providers may have free resources available that can be ``rented'' by other service providers. However, different cloud service providers can have different objectives or \emph{utilities}. Therefore, there is a need for a framework that can share and allocate resources in an efficient and effective way, while taking into account the objectives of various service providers that results in a \emph{multi-objective optimization} problem. In this paper, we present a \emph{Cooperative Game Theory} (CGT) based framework for resource sharing and allocation among different service providers with varying objectives that form a coalition. We show that the resource sharing problem can be modeled as an $N-$player \emph{canonical} cooperative game with \emph{non-transferable utility} (NTU) and prove that the game is convex for monotonic non-decreasing utilities. We propose an $\mathcal{O}({N})$ algorithm that provides an allocation from the \emph{core}, hence guaranteeing \emph{Pareto optimality}. We evaluate the performance of our proposed resource sharing framework in a number of simulation settings and show that our proposed framework improves user satisfaction and utility of service providers., Comment: The paper has been accepted for publication in IFIP WMNC 2019, Paris France

We consider the problem of optimally compressing and caching data across a communication network. Given the data generated at edge nodes and a routing path, our goal is to determine the optimal data compression ratios and caching decisions across the network in order to minimize average latency, which can be shown to be equivalent to maximizing the compression and caching gain under an energy consumption constraint. We show that this problem is NP-hard in general and the hardness is caused by the caching decision subproblem, while the compression sub-problem is polynomial-time solvable. We then propose an approximation algorithm that achieves a $(1-1/e)$-approximation solution to the optimum in strongly polynomial time. We show that our proposed algorithm achieve the near-optimal performance in synthetic-based evaluations. In this paper, we consider a tree-structured network as an illustrative example, but our results easily extend to general network topology at the expense of more complicated notations.

Energy efficiency is a fundamental requirement of modern data communication systems, and its importance is reflected in much recent work on performance analysis of system energy consumption. However, most works have only focused on communication and computation costs, but do not account for caching costs. Given the increasing interest in cache networks, this is a serious deficiency. {In this paper, we consider the problem of energy consumption in data communication, compression and caching (C$3$) with a Quality of Information (QoI) guarantee in a communication network. {Our goal is to identify the optimal data compression rate and data placement over the network to minimize the overall energy consumption in the network.} he formulated problem is a \emph{Mixed Integer Non-Linear Programming} (MINLP) problem with non-convex functions, which is NP-hard in general. } {We} propose a variant of spatial branch and bound algorithm (V-SBB), that can {provide} the $\epsilon$-global optimal solution to {our problem}. {We numerically show that our C3 optimization framework can improve the energy efficiency up to 88\% compared to any C2 optimization between communication and computation or caching. Furthermore, for our energy consumption problem, V-SBB {provides comparatively better solution than some other MINLP solvers.}}

One of the most vital activities to reduce energy consumption in wireless sensor networks is clustering. In clustering, one node from a group of nodes is selected to be a cluster head, which handles majority of the computation and processing for the nodes in the cluster. This paper proposes an algorithm for fuzzy based dynamic cluster head selection on cloud in wireless sensor networks. The proposed algorithm calculates a Potential value for each node and selects cluster heads with high potential. The proposed algorithm minimizes cluster overlapping by spatial distribution of cluster heads and discards malicious nodes i.e. never allows malicious nodes to be cluster heads.

We investigate the capability of localizing node failures in communication networks from binary states (normal/failed) of end-to-end paths. Given a set of nodes of interest, uniquely localizing failures within this set requires that different observable path states associate with different node failure events. However, this condition is difficult to test on large networks due to the need to enumerate all possible node failures. Our first contribution is a set of sufficient/necessary conditions for identifying a bounded number of failures within an arbitrary node set that can be tested in polynomial time. In addition to network topology and locations of monitors, our conditions also incorporate constraints imposed by the probing mechanism used. We consider three probing mechanisms that differ according to whether measurement paths are (i) arbitrarily controllable, (ii) controllable but cycle-free, or (iii) uncontrollable (determined by the default routing protocol). Our second contribution is to quantify the capability of failure localization through (1) the maximum number of failures (anywhere in the network) such that failures within a given node set can be uniquely localized, and (2) the largest node set within which failures can be uniquely localized under a given bound on the total number of failures. Both measures in (1-2) can be converted into functions of a per-node property, which can be computed efficiently based on the above sufficient/necessary conditions. We demonstrate how measures (1-2) proposed for quantifying failure localization capability can be used to evaluate the impact of various parameters, including topology, number of monitors, and probing mechanisms.

The problem of anomaly localization in a resource-constrained cyber system is considered. Each anomalous component of the system incurs a cost per unit time until its anomaly is identified and fixed. Different anomalous components may incur different costs depending on their criticality to the system. Due to resource constraints, only one component can be probed at each given time. The observations from a probed component are realizations drawn from two different distributions depending on whether the component is normal or anomalous. The objective is a probing strategy that minimizes the total expected cost, incurred by all the components during the detection process, under reliability constraints. We consider both independent and exclusive models. In the former, each component can be abnormal with a certain probability independent of other components. In the latter, one and only one component is abnormal. We develop optimal simple index policies under both models. The proposed index policies apply to a more general case where a subset (more than one) of the components can be probed simultaneously and have strong performance as demonstrated by simulation examples. The problem under study also finds applications in spectrum scanning in cognitive radio networks and event detection in sensor networks., Comment: 30 pages, 4 figures, accepted for publication in the IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing, part of this work was presented at the IEEE GlobalSIP 2013

We formulate and study the thinnest path problem in wireless ad hoc networks. The objective is to find a path from a source to its destination that results in the minimum number of nodes overhearing the message by a judicious choice of relaying nodes and their corresponding transmission power. We adopt a directed hypergraph model of the problem and establish the NP-completeness of the problem in 2-D networks. We then develop two polynomial-time approximation algorithms that offer $\sqrt{\frac{n}{2}}$ and $\frac{n}{2\sqrt{n-1}}$ approximation ratios for general directed hypergraphs (which can model non-isomorphic signal propagation in space) and constant approximation ratios for ring hypergraphs (which result from isomorphic signal propagation). We also consider the thinnest path problem in 1-D networks and 1-D networks embedded in 2-D field of eavesdroppers with arbitrary unknown locations (the so-called 1.5-D networks). We propose a linear-complexity algorithm based on nested backward induction that obtains the optimal solution to both 1-D and 1.5-D networks. This algorithm does not require the knowledge of eavesdropper locations and achieves the best performance offered by any algorithm that assumes complete location information of the eavesdroppers.

The problem of distributed learning and channel access is considered in a cognitive network with multiple secondary users. The availability statistics of the channels are initially unknown to the secondary users and are estimated using sensing decisions. There is no explicit information exchange or prior agreement among the secondary users. We propose policies for distributed learning and access which achieve order-optimal cognitive system throughput (number of successful secondary transmissions) under self play, i.e., when implemented at all the secondary users. Equivalently, our policies minimize the regret in distributed learning and access. We first consider the scenario when the number of secondary users is known to the policy, and prove that the total regret is logarithmic in the number of transmission slots. Our distributed learning and access policy achieves order-optimal regret by comparing to an asymptotic lower bound for regret under any uniformly-good learning and access policy. We then consider the case when the number of secondary users is fixed but unknown, and is estimated through feedback. We propose a policy in this scenario whose asymptotic sum regret which grows slightly faster than logarithmic in the number of transmission slots., Comment: Submitted to IEEE JSAC on Advances in Cognitive Radio Networking and Communications, Dec. 2009, Revised May 2010

We analyze the multihop delay of ad hoc cognitive radio networks, where the transmission delay of each hop consists of the propagation delay and the waiting time for the availability of the communication channel (i.e., the occurrence of a spectrum opportunity at this hop). Using theories and techniques from continuum percolation and ergodicity, we establish the scaling law of the minimum multihop delay with respect to the source-destination distance in cognitive radio networks. When the propagation delay is negligible, we show the starkly different scaling behavior of the minimum multihop delay in instantaneously connected networks as compared to networks that are only intermittently connected due to scarcity of spectrum opportunities. Specifically, if the network is instantaneously connected, the minimum multihop delay is asymptotically independent of the distance; if the network is only intermittently connected, the minimum multihop delay scales linearly with the distance. When the propagation delay is nonnegligible but small, we show that although the scaling order is always linear, the scaling rate for an instantaneously connected network can be orders of magnitude smaller than the one for an intermittently connected network., Comment: 28 pages, 9 figures

We address the connectivity of large-scale ad hoc heterogeneous wireless networks, where secondary users exploit channels temporarily unused by primary users and the existence of a communication link between two secondary users depends on not only the distance between them but also the transmitting and receiving activities of nearby primary users. We introduce the concept of connectivity region defined as the set of density pairs -- the density of secondary users and the density of primary transmitters -- under which the secondary network is connected. Using theories and techniques from continuum percolation, we analytically characterize the connectivity region of the secondary network and reveal the tradeoff between proximity (the number of neighbors) and the occurrence of spectrum opportunities. Specifically, we establish three basic properties of the connectivity region -- contiguity, monotonicity of the boundary, and uniqueness of the infinite connected component, where the uniqueness implies the occurrence of a phase transition phenomenon in terms of the almost sure existence of either zero or one infinite connected component; we identify and analyze two critical densities which jointly specify the profile as well as an outer bound on the connectivity region; we study the impacts of secondary users' transmission power on the connectivity region and the conditional average degree of a secondary user, and demonstrate that matching the interference ranges of the primary and the secondary networks maximizes the tolerance of the secondary network to the primary traffic load. Furthermore, we establish a necessary condition and a sufficient condition for connectivity, which lead to an outer bound and an inner bound on the connectivity region., Comment: 46 pages, 19 figures

We consider power control in cognitive radio networks where secondary users identify and exploit instantaneous and local spectrum opportunities without causing unacceptable interference to primary users. We qualitatively characterize the impact of the transmission power of secondary users on the occurrence of spectrum opportunities and the reliability of opportunity detection. Based on a Poisson model of the primary network, we quantify these impacts by showing that (i) the probability of spectrum opportunity decreases exponentially with respect to the transmission power of secondary users, where the exponential decay constant is given by the traffic load of primary users; (ii) reliable opportunity detection is achieved in the two extreme regimes in terms of the ratio between the transmission power of secondary users and that of primary users. Such analytical characterizations allow us to study power control for optimal transport throughput under constraints on the interference to primary users. Furthermore, we reveal the difference between detecting primary signals and detecting spectrum opportunities, and demonstrate the complex relationship between physical layer spectrum sensing and MAC layer throughput. The dependency of this PHY-MAC interaction on the application type and the use of handshake signaling such as RTS/CTS is illustrated., Comment: 20 pages, 10 figures, to appear in IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications (JSAC): Special Issue on Stochastic Geometry and Random Graphs for Wireless Networks

The energy scaling laws of multihop data fusion networks for distributed inference are considered. The fusion network consists of randomly located sensors distributed i.i.d. according to a general spatial distribution in an expanding region. Among the class of data fusion schemes that enable optimal inference at the fusion center for Markov random field (MRF) hypotheses, the scheme with minimum average energy consumption is bounded below by average energy of fusion along the minimum spanning tree, and above by a suboptimal scheme, referred to as Data Fusion for Markov Random Fields (DFMRF). Scaling laws are derived for the optimal and suboptimal fusion policies. It is shown that the average asymptotic energy of the DFMRF scheme is finite for a class of MRF models., Comment: IEEE JSAC on Stochastic Geometry and Random Graphs for Wireless Networks

We address the design of opportunistic spectrum access (OSA) strategies that allow secondary users to independently search for and exploit instantaneous spectrum availability. Integrated in the joint design are three basic components: a spectrum sensor that identifies spectrum opportunities, a sensing strategy that determines which channels in the spectrum to sense, and an access strategy that decides whether to access based on imperfect sensing outcomes. We formulate the joint PHY-MAC design of OSA as a constrained partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP). Constrained POMDPs generally require randomized policies to achieve optimality, which are often intractable. By exploiting the rich structure of the underlying problem, we establish a separation principle for the joint design of OSA. This separation principle reveals the optimality of myopic policies for the design of the spectrum sensor and the access strategy, leading to closed-form optimal solutions. Furthermore, decoupling the design of the sensing strategy from that of the spectrum sensor and the access strategy, the separation principle reduces the constrained POMDP to an unconstrained one, which admits deterministic optimal policies. Numerical examples are provided to study the design tradeoffs, the interaction between the spectrum sensor and the sensing and access strategies, and the robustness of the ensuing design to model mismatch., Comment: 43 pages, 10 figures, submitted to IEEE Transactions on Information Theory in Feb. 2007