Computational offloading has become an enabling component for edge intelligence in mobile and smart devices. Existing offloading schemes mainly focus on mobile devices and servers, while ignoring the potential network congestion caused by tasks from multiple mobile devices, especially in wireless multi-hop networks. To fill this gap, we propose a low-overhead, congestion-aware distributed task offloading scheme by augmenting a distributed greedy framework with graph-based machine learning. In simulated wireless multi-hop networks with 20-110 nodes and a resource allocation scheme based on shortest path routing and contention-based link scheduling, our approach is demonstrated to be effective in reducing congestion or unstable queues under the context-agnostic baseline, while improving the execution latency over local computing.
Collaborative edge computing (CEC) is an emerging paradigm where heterogeneous edge devices (stakeholders) collaborate to fulfill computation tasks, such as model training or video processing, by sharing communication and computation resources. Nevertheless, the optimal data/result routing and computation offloading strategy in CEC with arbitrary topology still remains an open problem. In this paper, we formulate a partial-offloading and multi-hop routing model for arbitrarily divisible tasks. Each node individually decides the computation of the received data and the forwarding of data/result…
Intelligent network selection plays an important role in achieving an effective data offloading in the integrated cellular and Wi-Fi networks. However, previously proposed network selection schemes mainly focused on offloading as much data traffic to Wi-Fi as possible, without systematically considering the Wi-Fi network congestion and the ping-pong effect, both of which may lead to a poor overall user quality of experience. Thus, in this paper, we study a more practical network selection problem by considering both the impacts of the network congestion and switching penalties. More specifical…
University of Bologna（博洛尼亚大学）；Lancaster University（兰卡斯特大学）；University of Tübingen（蒂宾根大学）；University of Manitoba（曼尼托巴大学）
With the rapid advancement of Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) and vehicular communications, Vehicular Edge Computing (VEC) is emerging as a promising technology to support low-latency ITS applications and services. In this paper, we consider the computation offloading problem from mobile vehicles/users in a heterogeneous VEC scenario, and focus on the network- and base station selection problems, where different networks have different traffic loads. In a fast-varying vehicular environment, computation offloading experience of users is strongly affected by the latency due to the conge…
Congestions in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) could potentially cause packet loss, throughput impairment and energy waste. To address this issue, a hop-by-hop cross-layer congestion control scheme (HCCC) built on contention-based MAC protocol is proposed in this paper. According to MAC-layer channel information including buffer occupancy ratio and congestion degree of local node, HCCC dynamically adjusts channel access priority in MAC layer and data transmission rate of the node to tackle the problem of congestion. Simulations have been conducted to compare HCCC against closely-related existi…
In Heterogeneous mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) congestion occurs with limited resources. Due to the shared wireless channel and dynamic topology, packet transmissions suffer from interference and fading. In heterogeneous ad hoc networks, throughput via a given route is depending on the minimum data rate of all its links. In a route of links with various data rates, if a high data rate node forwards more traffic to a low data rate node, there is a chance of congestion, which leads to long queuing delays in such routes. Since hop count is used as a routing metric in traditional routing, it do …
To alleviate the congestion caused by rapid growth in demand for mobile data, wireless service providers (WSPs) have begun encouraging users to offload some of their traffic onto supplementary network technologies, e.g., offloading from 3G or 4G to WiFi or femtocells. With the growing popularity of such offerings, a deeper understanding of the underlying economic principles and their impact on technology adoption is necessary. To this end, we develop a model for user adoption of a base technology (e.g., 3G) and a bundle of the base plus a supplementary technology (e.g., 3G + WiFi). Users indiv…
Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are increasingly employed for numerous public and civil applications, such as goods delivery, medicine, surveillance, and telecommunications. For the latter, UAVs with onboard communication equipment may help temporarily offload traffic onto the neighboring cells in fifth-generation networks and beyond (5G+). In this paper, we propose and evaluate the use of UAVs traveling over the area of interest to relieve congestion in 5G+ systems under spontaneous traffic fluctuations. To this end, we assess two inherently different offloading schemes, named routed and cont…
Edge computing (EC) is a promising paradigm providing a distributed computing solution for users at the edge of the network. Preserving satisfactory quality of experience (QoE) for users when offloading their computation to EC is a non-trivial problem. Computation offloading in EC requires jointly optimizing access points (APs) allocation and edge service placement for users, which is computationally intractable due to its combinatorial nature. Moreover, users are self-interested, and they can misreport their preferences leading to inefficient resource allocation and network congestion. In thi…
Data centers traffic is composed by numerous latency-sensitive "mice" flows, which is consisted of only several packets, and a few throughput-sensitive "elephant" flows, which occupy more than 80% of overall load. Generally, the short-lived "mice" flows induce transient congestion and the long-lived "elephant" flows cause persistent congestion. The network congestion is a major performance inhibitor. Conventionally, the hop-by-hop and end-to-end flow control mechanisms are employed to relief transient and persistent congestion, respectively. However, in face of the mixture of elephants and mic…
Mobile data offloading is an emerging technology to avoid congestion in cellular networks and improve the level of user satisfaction. In this paper, we develop a distributed market framework to price the offloading service, and conduct a detailed analysis of the incentives for offloading service providers and conflicts arising from the interactions of different participators. Specifically, we formulate a multi-leader multi-follower Stackelberg game (MLMF-SG) to model the interactions between the offloading service providers and the offloading service consumers in the considered market framewor…
This paper reports on the first systematic study of congestion-aware routing algorithms for wireless mesh networks to achieve an improved end-end delay performance. In particular, we compare 802.11 compatible implementations of a set of congestion-aware routing protocols against our implementation of state of the art shortest path routing protocol (SRCR). We implement congestion-aware routing algorithms Backpressure (BP), Enhanced-Backpressure (E-BP) adapted from [1], [2] suitably adjusted for 802.11 implementation. We then propose and implement Congestion Diversity Protocol (CDP) adapted from…
Distributed scheduling algorithms for throughput or utility maximization in dense wireless multi-hop networks can have overwhelmingly high overhead, causing increased congestion, energy consumption, radio footprint, and security vulnerability. For wireless networks with dense connectivity, we propose a distributed scheme for link sparsification with graph convolutional networks (GCNs), which can reduce the scheduling overhead while keeping most of the network capacity. In a nutshell, a trainable GCN module generates node embeddings as topology-aware and reusable parameters for a local decision…
This paper considers a setting where embedded devices are used to acquire and classify images. Because of limited computing capacity, embedded devices rely on a parsimonious classification model with uneven accuracy. When local classification is deemed inaccurate, devices can decide to offload the image to an edge server with a more accurate but resource-intensive model. Resource constraints, e.g., network bandwidth, however, require regulating such transmissions to avoid congestion and high latency. The paper investigates this offloading problem when transmissions regulation is through a toke…
One of the main drivers of 5G cellular networks is provision of connectivity service for various Internet of Things (IoT) devices. Considering the potential volume of IoT devices at a global scale, the next leap is to integrate Non-Terrestrial Networks (NTN) into 5G terrestrial systems, thereby extend the coverage and complement the terrestrial service. This paper focuses on the use of Low-Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite constellations for two specific purposes: offloading and backhauling. The former allows offloading IoT traffic from a congested terrestrial network, usually in a very dense area. …
With the development of next-generation wireless networks, the Internet of Things (IoT) is evolving towards the intelligent IoT (iIoT), where intelligent applications usually have stringent delay and jitter requirements. In order to provide low-latency services to heterogeneous users in the emerging iIoT, multi-tier computing was proposed by effectively combining edge computing and fog computing. More specifically, multi-tier computing systems compensate for cloud computing through task offloading and dispersing computing tasks to multi-tier nodes along the continuum from the cloud to things. …
In order to cope with the explosive growth of data traffic which is associated with a wide plethora of emerging applications and services that are expected to be used by both ordinary users and vertical industries, the congestion control mechanism is considered to be vital. In this paper, we proposed a congestion control mechanism that could function within the framework of Multi-Access Edge Computing (MEC). The proposed mechanism is aiming to make real-time decisions for selectively buffering traffic while taking network condition and Quality of Service (QoS) into consideration. In order to s…
A new era in wireless sensor network technology has been ushered in through the introduction of multimedia sensor networks, which has a major bottleneck in the form of network congestion. Congestion occurs when resources are in high demand during the active period while the data processing and transmission speeds lag behind the speed of the incoming traffic. This may disrupt normal network operations by buffer overflow, packet loss, increased latency, excessive energy consumption and even worse, a collapse of the entire operation. In this paper we propose a novel Trust Integrated Congestion-aw…
With the rapid growth of mobile traffic demand, a promising approach to relieve cellular network congestion is to offload users' traffic to small-cell networks. In this paper, we investigate how the mobile users (MUs) can effectively offload traffic by taking advantage of the capability of dual-connectivity, which enables an MU to simultaneously communicate with a macro base station (BS) and a small-cell access point (AP) via two radio-interfaces. Offloading traffic to the AP usually reduces the MUs' mobile data cost, but often at the expense of suffering increased interferences from other MUs…
Offloading data traffic from Infrastructure-to-Device (I2D) to Device-to-Device (D2D) communications is a powerful tool for reducing congestion, energy consumption, and spectrum usage of mobile cellular networks. Prior network-level studies on D2D data offloading focus on high level performance metrics as the offloading efficiency, and take into account the radio propagation aspects by using simplistic wireless channel models. We consider a D2D data offloading protocol tailored to highly dynamic scenarios as vehicular environments, and evaluate its performance focusing on physical layer aspect…
Multi-access edge computing (MEC) emerges as an essential part of the upcoming Fifth Generation (5G) and future beyond-5G mobile communication systems. It adds computational power towards the edge of cellular networks, much closer to energy-constrained user devices, and therewith allows the users to offload tasks to the edge computing nodes for low-latency applications with very-limited battery consumption. However, due to the high dynamics of user demand and server load, task congestion may occur at the edge nodes resulting in long queuing delay. Such delays can significantly degrade the qual…
Standard congestion control cannot detect link failure losses which occur due to mobility and power scarcity in multi-hop Ad-Hoc network (MANET). Moreover, successive executions of Back-off algorithm deficiently grow Retransmission Timeout (RTO) exponentially for new route. The importance of detecting and responding link failure losses is to prevent sender from remaining idle unnecessarily and manage number of packet retransmission overhead. In contrast to Cross-layer approaches which require feedback information from lower layers, this paper operates purely in Transport layer. This paper expl…
Caching can be leveraged to significantly improve network performance and mitigate congestion. However, characterizing the optimal tradeoff between routing cost and cache deployment cost remains an open problem. In this paper, for a network with arbitrary topology and congestion-dependent nonlinear cost functions, we aim to jointly determine the cache deployment, content placement, and hop-by-hop routing strategies, so that the sum of routing cost and cache deployment cost is minimized. We tackle this NP-hard problem starting with a fixed-routing setting, and then to a general dynamic-routing …
Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) is the dominant reliable transport protocol utilized in the Internet. Improving the performance of TCP associated with the presence of multi-hop is one of the research challenges in wireless mesh networks. Wireless mesh networks have large round trip time variations and these variations are dependent on the number of hops. In wireless mesh network, when congestion loss and wireless loss are co-existed the number of packets dropped increases and will have adverse effects on TCP and its congestion control mechanism which leads to low throughput. Here we have d…
In this paper, we analyze some local stability and local bifurcation properties of the Proportionally fair, TCP fair, and the Delay-based dual algorithms in the presence of two distinct time delays. In particular, our focus is on the interplay between different notions of fairness, stability, and bifurcation theoretic properties. Different notions of fairness give rise to different non-linear models for the class of Dual algorithms. One can devise conditions for local stability, for each of these models, but such conditions do not offer clear design recommendations on which fairness criteria i…
In recent years, offloading mobile traffic through Wi-Fi has emerged as a potential solution to lower down the communication cost for mobile users. Users hope to reduce the cost while keeping the delay in an acceptable range through Wi-Fi offloading. Also, different users have different sensitivities to the cost and the delay performance. How to make a proper cost-delay tradeoff according to the user's preference is the key issue in the design of the offloading strategy. To address this issue, we propose a preference-oriented offloading strategy for current commercial terminals, which transmit…
The unprecedented growth of mobile data traffic challenges the performance and economic viability of today's cellular networks, and calls for novel network architectures and communication solutions. Data offloading through third-party WiFi or femtocell access points (APs) can effectively alleviate the cellular network congestion in a low operational and capital expenditure. This solution requires the cooperation and agreement of mobile cellular network operators (MNOs) and AP owners (APOs). In this paper, we model and analyze the interaction among one MNO and multiple APOs (for the amount of M…
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…
In mobile adhoc networks, congestion occurs with limited resources. The standard TCP congestion control mechanism is not able to handle the special properties of a shared wireless channel. TCP congestion control works very well on the Internet. But mobile adhoc networks exhibit some unique properties that greatly affect the design of appropriate protocols and protocol stacks in general, and of congestion control mechanism in particular. As it turned out, the vastly differing environment in a mobile adhoc network is highly problematic for standard TCP. Many approaches have been proposed to over…
Identifying the occurrence of congestion in a Mobile Ad-hoc Network (MANET) is a major task. The inbuilt congestion control techniques of existing Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) designed for wired networks do not handle the unique properties of shared wireless multi-hop link. There are several approaches proposed for detecting and overcoming the congestion in the mobile ad-hoc network. In this paper we present a Modified AD-hoc Transmission Control Protocol (M-ADTCP) method where the receiver detects the probable current network status and transmits this information to the sender as feedb…
Satellite networks are booming to provide high-speed and low latency Internet access, but the transport layer becomes one of the main obstacles. Legacy end-to-end TCP is designed for terrestrial networks, not suitable for error-prone, propagation delay varying, and intermittent satellite links. It is necessary to make a clean-slate design for the satellite transport layer. This paper introduces a novel Information-centric Hop-by-Hop transport layer design, INTCP. It carries out hop-by-hop packets retransmission and hop-by-hop congestion control with the help of cache and request-response model…
Cooperative inter-vehicular applications rely on the exchange of broadcast single-hop status messages among vehicles, called beacons. The aggregated load on the wireless channel due to periodic beacons can prevent the transmission of other types of messages, what is called channel congestion due to beaconing activity. In this paper we approach the problem of controlling the beaconing rate on each vehicle by modeling it as a Network Utility Maximization (NUM) problem. This allows us to formally apply the notion of fairness of a beaconing rate allocation in vehicular networks and to control the …
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…
The advancements of remote sensing (RS) pose increasingly high demands on computation and transmission resources. Conventional ground-offloading techniques, which transmit large amounts of raw data to the ground, suffer from poor satellite-to-ground link quality. In addition, existing satellite-offloading techniques, which offload computational tasks to low earth orbit (LEO) satellites located within the visible range of RS satellites for processing, cannot leverage the full computing capability of the network because the computational resources of visible LEO satellites are limited. This situ…
We present a study of transport on complex networks with routing based on local information. Particles hop from one node of the network to another according to a set of routing rules with different degrees of congestion awareness, ranging from random diffusion to rigid congestion-gradient driven flow. Each node can be either source or destination for particles and all nodes have the same routing capacity, which are features of ad-hoc wireless networks. It is shown that the transport capacity increases when a small amount of congestion awareness is present in the routing rules, and that it then…
As mobile edge computing (MEC) finds widespread use for relieving the computational burden of compute- and interaction-intensive applications on end user devices, understanding the resulting delay and cost performance is drawing significant attention. While most existing works focus on singletask offloading in single-hop MEC networks, next generation applications (e.g., industrial automation, augmented/virtual reality) require advance models and algorithms for dynamic configuration of multi-task services over multi-hop MEC networks. In this work, we leverage recent advances in dynamic cloud ne…
We consider the problem of designing a packet-level congestion control and scheduling policy for datacenter networks. Current datacenter networks primarily inherit the principles that went into the design of Internet, where congestion control and scheduling are distributed. While distributed architecture provides robustness, it suffers in terms of performance. Unlike Internet, data center is fundamentally a "controlled" environment. This raises the possibility of designing a centralized architecture to achieve better performance. Recent solutions such as Fastpass and Flowtune have provided the…
Adaptive routing algorithm has been employed in multichip interconnection networks in order to improve network performance. Does a algorithm use local or global network state? This is the key question in adaptive routing. In many traffic patterns, the ignorance of global network state, leading to routing selection based only on local congestion information, tends to violate global load balance. To attack the load balance issue in adapting routing, some global adaptive routing algorithms introduce a congestion propagation network to obtain global network status information, such as Regional Con…
We consider the problem of routing packets across a multi-hop network consisting of multiple sources of traffic and wireless links while ensuring bounded expected delay. Each packet transmission can be overheard by a random subset of receiver nodes among which the next relay is selected opportunistically. The main challenge in the design of minimum-delay routing policies is balancing the trade-off between routing the packets along the shortest paths to the destination and distributing traffic according to the maximum backpressure. Combining important aspects of shortest path and backpressure r…
