Opportunistic mobile networks consisting of intermittently connected mobile devices have been exploited for various applications, such as computational offloading and mitigating cellular traffic load. In contrast to existing work, in this paper, we focus on cooperatively offloading data among mobile devices to maximally improve the probability of data delivery from a mobile device to intermittently connected infrastructure within a given time constraint, which is referred to as the \textit{cooperative offloading} problem. Unfortunately, the estimation of data delivery probability over an opportunistic path is difficult and cooperative offloading is NP-hard. To this end, we first propose a probabilistic framework that provides the estimation of such probability. Based on the proposed probabilistic framework, we design a heuristic algorithm to solve cooperative offloading at a low computation cost. Due to the lack of global information, a distributed algorithm is further proposed. The performance of the proposed approaches is evaluated based on both synthetic networks and real traces. Experimental results show that the probabilistic framework can accurately estimate the data delivery probability, cooperative offloading greatly improves the delivery probability, the heuristic algorithm approximates the optimum, and the performance of both the heuristic algorithm and distributed algorithm outperforms other approaches.
Offloading traffic through opportunistic communications has been recently proposed as a way to relieve the current overload of cellular networks. Opportunistic communication can occur when mobile device users are (temporarily) in each other's proximity, such that the devices can establish a local peer-to-peer connection (e.g., via Bluetooth). Since opportunistic communication is based on the spontaneous mobility of the participants, it is inherently unreliable. This poses a serious challenge to the design of any cellular offloading solutions, that must meet the applications' requirements. In t…
Institute for Informatics and Telematics, National Research Council（国家研究委员会信息与远程信息处理研究所）
The widespread diffusion of mobile phones is triggering an exponential growth of mobile data traffic that is likely to cause, in the near future, considerable traffic overload issues even in last-generation cellular networks. Offloading part of the traffic to other networks is considered a very promising approach and, in particular, in this paper, we consider offloading through opportunistic networks of users' devices. However, the performance of this solution strongly depends on the pattern of encounters between mobile nodes, which should therefore be taken into account when designing offload…
We present a general framework for improving and extending GNSS-based positioning by leveraging opportunistic measurements from legacy terrestrial radio signals. The proposed approach requires only that participating nodes collect and share reception timestamps of incoming packets and/or other reference signals transmitted by other fixed or mobile nodes, with no need of inter-node synchronization. The envisioned scheme couples the idea of cooperative GNSS augmentation with recent pioneering work in the field of time-based localization in asynchronous networks. In this contribution we present t…
Mobile users are envisioned to exploit direct communication opportunities between their portable devices, in order to enrich the set of services they can access through cellular or WiFi networks. Sharing contents of common interest or providing access to resources or services between peers can enhance a mobile node's capabilities, offload the cellular network, and disseminate information to nodes without Internet access. Interest patterns, i.e. how many nodes are interested in each content or service (popularity), as well as how many users can provide a content or service (availability) impact…
This paper investigates the use of WiFi and mobile device-to-device networks, with vehicular ad hoc networks being a typical example, as a complementary means to offload and reduce the traffic load of cellular networks. A novel cooperative content dissemination strategy is proposed for a heterogeneous network consisting of different types of devices with different levels of mobility, ranging from static WiFi access points to mobile devices such as vehicles. The proposed strategy offloads a significant proportion of data traffic from cellular networks to WiFi or device-to-device networks. Detai…
We propose a novel edge computing network architecture that enables edge nodes to cooperate in sharing computing and radio resources to minimize the total energy consumption of mobile users while meeting their delay requirements. To find the optimal task offloading decisions for mobile users, we first formulate the joint task offloading and resource allocation optimization problem as a mixed integer non-linear programming (MINLP). The optimization involves both binary (offloading decisions) and real variables (resource allocations), making it an NP-hard and computational intractable problem. T…
The 5G Internet of Vehicles has become a new paradigm alongside the growing popularity and variety of computation-intensive applications with high requirements for computational resources and analysis capabilities. Existing network architectures and resource management mechanisms may not sufficiently guarantee satisfactory Quality of Experience and network efficiency, mainly suffering from coverage limitation of Road Side Units, insufficient resources, and unsatisfactory computational capabilities of onboard equipment, frequently changing network topology, and ineffective resource management s…
This paper considers a cooperative status update system with a source aiming to send randomly generated status updates to a designated destination as timely as possible with the help of a relay. We adopt a recently proposed concept, Age of Information (AoI), to characterize the timeliness of the status updates. We propose an age-oriented opportunistic relaying (AoR) protocol to reduce the AoI of the considered system. Specifically, the relay opportunistically replaces the source to retransmit the successfully received status updates that have not been correctly delivered to the destination, bu…
Future vehicles will have rich computing resources to support autonomous driving and be connected by wireless technologies. Vehicular fog networks (VeFN) have thus emerged to enable computing resource sharing via computation task offloading, providing wide range of fog applications. However, the high mobility of vehicles makes it hard to guarantee the delay that accounts for both communication and computation throughout the whole task offloading procedure. In this article, we first review the state-of-the-art of task offloading in VeFN, and argue that mobility is not only an obstacle for timel…
In this paper we present a multi-user cooperative protocol for wireless networks. Two sources transmit simultaneously their information blocks and relays employ opportunistically successive interference cancellation (SIC) in an effort to decode them. An adaptive decode/amplify-and-forward scheme is applied at the relays to the decoded blocks or their sufficient statistic if decoding fails. The main feature of the protocol is that SIC is exploited in a network since more opportunities arise for each block to be decoded as the number of used relays NRU is increased. This feature leads to benefit…
Increasing storage sizes and WiFi/Bluetooth capabilities of mobile devices have made them a good platform for opportunistic content sharing. In this work we propose a network model to study this in a setting with two characteristics: 1. delay tolerant; 2. lack of infrastructure. Mobile users generate requests and opportunistically download from other users they meet, via Bluetooth or WiFi. The difference in popularity of different web content induces a non-uniform request distribution, which is usually a Zipf's law distribution. We evaluate the performance of different caching schemes and deri…
Task offloading provides a promising way to enhance the capability of the mobile terminal (also called terminal user) that is distributed on network edge and communicates edge clouds with wireless. Generally, there are multiple edge cloud nodes with distinct processing capability in a geographic area, which can offer computing service for various terminal users. Furthermore, the terminal users are competitive and selfish, i.e., each user takes into account only maximizing her own profit, while conducting task offloading strategies. In this paper, we focus on the resource management optimizatio…
In this paper, we jointly optimize computation offloading and resource allocation to minimize the weighted sum of energy consumption of all mobile users in a backhaul limited cooperative MEC system with multiple fog servers. Considering the partial offloading strategy and TDMA transmission at each base station, the underlying optimization problem with constraints on maximum task latency and limited computation resource at mobile users and fog servers is non-convex. We propose to convexify the problem exploiting the relationship among some optimization variables from which an optimal algorithm …
Privacy-sensitive data is stored in autonomous vehicles, smart devices, or sensor nodes that can move around with making opportunistic contact with each other. Federation among such nodes was mainly discussed in the context of federated learning with a centralized mechanism in many works. However, because of multi-vendor issues, those nodes do not want to rely on a specific server operated by a third party for this purpose. In this paper, we propose a wireless ad hoc federated learning (WAFL) -- a fully distributed cooperative machine learning organized by the nodes physically nearby. WAFL can…
Due to increased energy consumption and carbon emissions of the ICT industry, operators worldwide are focusing on reducing energy consumption of their networks from financial as well as corporate responsibility perspectives. The subject of green or energy efficient operation of cellular access network has attracted a lot of attention in the research community recently. In this regard, dynamically powering down the radio network equipment has emerged as a promising solution. In literature, research around this type of techniques has mainly focused on quantifying the energy saving potential. How…
In this paper, we investigate the issue of spectrum assignment in CRNs and examine various opportunistic spectrum access approaches proposed in the literature. We provide insight into the efficiency of such approaches and their ability to attain their design objectives. We discuss the factors that impact the selection of the appropriate operating channel(s), including the important interaction between the cognitive linkquality conditions and the time-varying nature of PRNs. Protocols that consider such interaction are described. We argue that using best quality channels does not achieve the ma…
A novel subcarrier-pair based opportunistic DF protocol is proposed for cooperative downlink OFDMA transmission aided by a decode-and-forward (DF) relay. Specifically, user message bits are transmitted in two consecutive equal-duration time slots. A subcarrier in the first slot can be paired with a subcarrier in the second slot for the DF relay-aided transmission to a user. In particular, the source and the relay can transmit simultaneously to implement beamforming at the subcarrier in the second slot for the relay-aided transmission. Each unpaired subcarrier in either the first or second slot…
Beyond 5G networks are expected to support massive traffic through decentralized solutions and advanced networking mechanisms. This paper aims at contributing towards this vision through the integration of device-centric wireless networks, including Device-to-Device (D2D) communications, and the Next Generation of Opportunistic networking (NGO). This integration offers multiple communication modes such as opportunistic cellular and opportunistic D2D-aided communications. Previous studies have demonstrated the potential and benefits of this integration in terms of energy efficiency, spectral ef…
Scavenging the idling computation resources at the enormous number of mobile devices can provide a powerful platform for local mobile cloud computing. The vision can be realized by peer-to-peer cooperative computing between edge devices, referred to as co-computing. This paper considers a co-computing system where a user offloads computation of input-data to a helper. The helper controls the offloading process for the objective of minimizing the user's energy consumption based on a predicted helper's CPU-idling profile that specifies the amount of available computation resource for co-computin…
With the blasting increase of wireless data traffic, incumbent wireless service providers (WSPs) face critical challenges in provisioning spectrum resource. Given the permission of unlicensed access to TV white spaces, WSPs can alleviate their burden by exploiting the concept of "capacity offload" to transfer part of their traffic load to unlicensed spectrum. For such use cases, a central problem is for WSPs to coexist with others, since all of them may access the unlicensed spectrum without coordination thus interfering each other. Game theory provides tools for predicting the behavior of WSP…
This letter studies distributed opportunistic channel access in a wireless network with decode-and-forward relays. All the sources use channel contention to get transmission opportunity. If a source wins the contention, the channel state information in the first-hop channel (from the source to its relay) is estimated, and a decision is made for the winner source to either give up the transmission opportunity and let all sources start a new contention, or transmit to the relay. Once the relay gets the traffic, it may have a sequence of probings of the second-hop channel (from the relay to the d…
The femtocaching idea was proposed as a solution to compensate for the weak backhaul capacity, by deploying coverage-limited nodes with high storage capacity called femtocaches (FCs). In this paper, the macrocell offloading problem in femtocaching-assisted cellular networks is investigated. The objective is to minimize the number of transmissions by the macrocell base station (MBS) given that all requests should be served simultaneously to satisfy quality-of-experience (QoE) of the clients. We first formulate this MBS offloading problem as an optimization problem over a network coding graph, a…
Coexistence, and hence interference mitigation, across multiple wireless body area networks (WBANs) is an important problem as WBANs become more pervasive. Here, two-hop relay-assisted cooperative communications using opportunistic relaying (OR) is proposed for enhancement of coexistence for WBANs. Suitable time division multiple access (TDMA) schemes are employed for both intra-WBAN and inter-WBANs access protocols. To emulate actual conditions of WBAN use, extensive on-body and inter-body "everyday" channel measurements are employed. In addition, a realistic inter-WBAN channel model is simul…
Multi-access edge computing (MEC) and network function virtualization (NFV) are promising technologies to support emerging IoT applications, especially those computation-intensive. In NFV-enabled MEC environment, service function chain (SFC), i.e., a set of ordered virtual network functions (VNFs), can be mapped on MEC servers. Mobile devices (MDs) can offload computation-intensive applications, which can be represented by SFCs, fully or partially to MEC servers for remote execution. This paper studies the partial offloading and SFC mapping joint optimization (POSMJO) problem in an NFV-enabled…
Mobile edge computing (MEC) is a new paradigm that provides cloud computing services at the edge of networks. To achieve better performance with limited computing resources, peer offloading between cooperative edge servers (e.g. MEC- enabled base stations) has been proposed as an effective technique to handle bursty and spatially imbalanced arrival of computation tasks. While various performance metrics of peer offloading policies have been considered in the literatures, the worst-case response time, a common Quality of Service(QoS) requirement in real-time applications, yet receives much less…
To meet the ever-growing demand for a higher communicating rate and better communication quality, more and more small cells are overlaid under the macro base station (MBS) tier, thus forming the heterogeneous networks. Small cells can ease the load pressure of MBS but lack of the guarantee of performance. On the other hand, cooperation draws more and more attention because of the great potential of small cell densification. Some technologies matured in wired network can also be applied to cellular networks, such as Software-defined networking (SDN). SDN helps simplify the structure of multi-ti…
Major wireless operators are nowadays facing network capacity issues in striving to meet the growing demands of mobile users. At the same time, 3G-enabled devices increasingly benefit from ad hoc radio connectivity (e.g., Wi-Fi). In this context of hybrid connectivity, we propose Push-and-track, a content dissemina- tion framework that harnesses ad hoc communication opportunities to minimize the load on the wireless infrastructure while guaranteeing tight delivery delays. It achieves this through a control loop that collects user-sent acknowledgements to determine if new copies need to be rein…
In this paper, a cooperative two-hop communication scheme, together with opportunistic relaying (OR), is applied within a mobile wireless body area network (WBAN). Its effectiveness in interference mitigation is investigated in a scenario where there are multiple closely-located networks. Due to a typical WBAN's nature, no coordination is used among different WBANs. A suitable time-division-multiple-access (TDMA) is adopted as both an intra-network and also an inter-network access scheme. Extensive on-body and off-body channel gain measurements are employed to gauge performance, which are over…
Enhancing the current services or deploying new services operating in RF spectrum requires more licensed spectrum which may not be provided by the regulatory bodies because of spectrum scarcity. On the contrary, recent studies suggest that many portions of the licensed spectrum remains unused or underused for significant period of time raising the issue of spectrum access without license in an opportunistic manner. Among all the spectrum accessing techniques, sensing based methods are considered optimal for their simplicity and cost effectiveness. In this paper, we introduce a new cooperative …
Opportunistic computation offloading is an effective method to improve the computation performance of mobile-edge computing (MEC) networks under dynamic edge environment. In this paper, we consider a multi-user MEC network with time-varying wireless channels and stochastic user task data arrivals in sequential time frames. In particular, we aim to design an online computation offloading algorithm to maximize the network data processing capability subject to the long-term data queue stability and average power constraints. The online algorithm is practical in the sense that the decisions for ea…
In order to support communication and computation cooperation, we propose ME-RAN architecture, which consists of mobile edge cloud (ME) as the computation provision platform and radio access network (RAN) as the communication interface. Cooperative offloading framework is proposed to achieve the following tasks: (1) to increase user equipment' (UE') computing capacity by triggering offloading action, especially for the UE which cannot complete the computation locally; (2) to reduce the energy consumption for all the UEs by considering limited computing and communication resources. Based on abo…
This paper develops a sum-power minimized resource allocation (RA) algorithm subject to a sum-rate constraint for cooperative orthogonal frequency division modulation (OFDM) transmission with subcarrier-pair based opportunistic decode-and-forward (DF) relaying. The improved DF protocol first proposed in [1] is used with optimized subcarrier pairing. Instrumental to the RA algorithm design is appropriate definition of variables to represent source/relay power allocation, subcarrier pairing and transmission-mode selection elegantly, so that after continuous relaxation, the dual method and the Hu…
A new, fair relay selection scheme is proposed for a dual-hop decode-and-forward network with randomly-distributed relays. Most of the reported works in the literature achieve fairness at the expense of degrading the outage probability performance. In addition, they often assume that the number and locations of the relays are known. In contrast, the proposed scheme achieves fairness in a random field of relays without deteriorating the outage probability performance. In this scheme, each relay maintains a countdown timer whose initial value is a function of the relay location and a tunable par…
In this paper, we study and analyze cooperative cognitive radio networks with arbitrary number of secondary users (SUs). Each SU is considered a prospective relay for the primary user (PU) besides having its own data transmission demand. We consider a multi-packet transmission framework which allows multiple SUs to transmit simultaneously thanks to dirty-paper coding. We propose power allocation and scheduling policies that optimize the throughput for both PU and SU with minimum energy expenditure. The performance of the system is evaluated in terms of throughput and delay under different oppo…
Tracking movement of mobile nodes has received significant scientific and commercial interest, but long term tracking of resource-constrained mobile nodes remains challenging due to the high energy consumption of satellite receivers. Cooperative position tracking has been proposed for energy efficiency, however, all the cooperative schemes use opportunistic cooperation and optimize for either energy or accuracy. Considering the existence of a reasonably stable group of mobile nodes like animals, birds, and mobile assets, we propose a cluster-based cooperative tracking algorithm, where cluster …
This paper studies the problem of distributed spectrum/channel access for cognitive radio-enabled unmanned aerial vehicles (CUAVs) that overlay upon primary channels. Under the framework of cooperative spectrum sensing and opportunistic transmission, a one-shot optimization problem for channel allocation, aiming to maximize the expected cumulative weighted reward of multiple CUAVs, is formulated. To handle the uncertainty due to the lack of prior knowledge about the primary user activities as well as the lack of the channel-access coordinator, the original problem is cast into a competition an…
In this paper, a novel framework for optimizing the caching of popular user content at the level of wireless user equipments (UEs) is proposed. The goal is to improve content offloading over wireless device-to-device (D2D) communication links. In the considered network, users belong to different social communities while their UEs form a single multi-hop D2D network. The proposed framework allows to exploit the multi-community social context of users for improving the local offloading of cached content in a multihop D2D network. To model the collaborative effect of a set of UEs on content offlo…
We develop a joint offloading and resource allocation framework for a multi-layer cooperative fog computing network, aiming to minimize the total energy consumption of multiple mobile devices subject to their service delay requirements. The resulting optimization involves both binary (offloading decisions) and real variables (resource allocations), making it an NP-hard and computationally intractable problem. To tackle it, we first propose an improved branch-and-bound algorithm (IBBA) that is implemented in a centralized manner. However, due to the large size of the cooperative fog computing n…
Cognitive Radio Networks allow unlicensed users to opportunistically access the licensed spectrum without causing disruptive interference to the primary users (PUs). One of the main challenges in CRNs is the ability to detect PU transmissions. Recent works have suggested the use of secondary user (SU) cooperation over individual sensing to improve sensing accuracy. In this paper, we consider a CRN consisting of a single PU and multiple SUs to study the problem of maximizing the total expected system throughput. We propose a Bayesian decision rule based algorithm to solve the problem optimally …
Tsinghua University（清华大学）；Hitachi (China) Research & Development Cooperation（日立（中国）研究开发有限公司）
Deep neural networks (DNNs) are state-of-the-art solutions for many machine learning applications, and have been widely used on mobile devices. Running DNNs on resource-constrained mobile devices often requires the help from edge servers via computation offloading. However, offloading through a bandwidth-limited wireless link is non-trivial due to the tight interplay between the computation resources on mobile devices and wireless resources. Existing studies have focused on cooperative inference where DNN models are partitioned at different neural network layers, and the two parts are executed…
In recent years, network coding has emerged as an innovative method that helps a wireless network approach its maximum capacity, by combining multiple unicasts in one broadcast. However, the majority of research conducted in this area is yet to fully utilize the broadcasting nature of wireless networks, and still assumes fixed route between the source and destination that every packet should travel through. This assumption not only limits coding opportunities, but can also cause buffer overflow in some specific intermediate nodes. Although some studies considered scattering of the flows dynami…
This paper describes a strategy that was designed, implemented, and presented at the {\it Mobile Ad Hoc Networking Interoperability and Cooperation (MANIAC) Challenge 2013}. The theme of the MANIAC Challenge 2013 was ``Mobile Data Offloading,'' and consisted on developing and comparatively evaluating strategies to offload infrastructure access points via customer ad hoc forwarding using handheld devices (e.g., tablets and smartphones). According to the challenge rules, a hop-by-hop bidding contest (or ``auction'') should decide the path of each data packet towards its destination. Consequently…
Interference in wireless networks is one of the key capacity-limiting factors. Recently developed interference-embracing techniques show promising performance on turning collisions into useful transmissions. However, the interference-embracing techniques are hard to apply in practical applications due to their strict requirements. In this paper, we consider utilising the interference-embracing techniques in a common scenario of two interfering sender-receiver pairs. By employing opportunistic listening and analog network coding (ANC), we show that compared to traditional ARQ retransmission, a …
Device-to-Device communications represent a paradigm shift in cellular networks. In particular, analytical results on D2D performance for offloading and relay are very promising, but no experimental evidence validates these results to date. This paper is the first to provide an experimental analysis of outband D2D relay schemes. Moreover, we design DORE, a complete framework for handling channel opportunities offered by outband D2D relay nodes. DORE consists of resource allocation optimization tools and protocols suitable to integrate QoS-aware opportunistic D2D communications within the archi…
Dynamic spectrum access allows the unlicensed wireless users (secondary users) to dynamically access the licensed bands from legacy spectrum holders (primary users) either on an opportunistic or a cooperative basis. In this paper, we focus on cooperative spectrum sharing in a wireless network consisting of multiple primary and multiple secondary users. In particular, we study the partner-selection and resource-allocation problems within a matching theory framework, in which the primary and secondary users aim at optimizing their utilities in terms of transmission rate and power consumption. We…
Deploying mobile edge computing (MEC) server in the mobile blockchain-enabled Internet of things (IoT) system is a promising approach to improve the system performance, however, it imposes a significant challenge on the trust of MEC server. To address this problem, we first propose an untrusted MEC proof of work scheme in mobile blockchain network where plenty of nonce hash computing demands can be offloaded to MEC server. Then, we design a nonce ordering algorithm for this scheme to provide fairer computing resource allocation for all mobile IoT devices/users. Specifically, we formulate the u…
Machine learning-based data rate prediction is one of the key drivers for anticipatory mobile networking with applications such as dynamic Radio Access Technology (RAT) selection, opportunistic data transfer, and predictive caching. User Equipment (UE)-based prediction approaches that rely on passive measurements of network quality indicators have successfully been applied to forecast the throughput of vehicular data transmissions. However, the achievable prediction accuracy is limited as the UE is unaware of the current network load. To overcome this issue, we propose a cooperative data rate …
This paper analyzes a broadcasting technique for wireless multi-hop sensor networks that uses a form of cooperative diversity called opportunistic large arrays (OLAs). We propose a method for autonomous scheduling of the nodes, which limits the nodes that relay and saves as much as 32% of the transmit energy compared to other broadcast approaches, without requiring Global Positioning System (GPS), individual node addressing, or inter-node interaction. This energy-saving is a result of cross-layer interaction, in the sense that the Medium Access Control (MAC) and routing functions are partially…
In this paper, we address the general case of a coordinated secondary network willing to exploit communication opportunities left vacant by a licensed primary network. Since secondary users (SU) usually have no prior knowledge on the environment, they need to learn the availability of each channel through sensing techniques, which however can be prone to detection errors. We argue that cooperation among secondary users can enable efficient learning and coordination mechanisms in order to maximize the spectrum exploitation by SUs, while minimizing the impact on the primary network. To this goal…
Sun Yat-sen University（中山大学）；University of Nevada, Reno（内华达大学里诺分校）；Arizona State University（亚利桑那州立大学）
Recent advances in artificial intelligence have driven increasing intelligent applications at the network edge, such as smart home, smart factory, and smart city. To deploy computationally intensive Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) on resource-constrained edge devices, traditional approaches have relied on either offloading workload to the remote cloud or optimizing computation at the end device locally. However, the cloud-assisted approaches suffer from the unreliable and delay-significant wide-area network, and the local computing approaches are limited by the constrained computing capability. To…
In this paper, we investigate the performance of a dual-hop block fading cognitive radio network with underlay spectrum sharing over independent but not necessarily identically distributed (i.n.i.d.) Nakagami-$m$ fading channels. The primary network consists of a source and a destination. Depending on whether the secondary network which consists of two source nodes have a single relay for cooperation or multiple relays thereby employs opportunistic relay selection for cooperation and whether the two source nodes suffer from the primary users' (PU) interference, two cases are considered in this…
