Xiaoming Fu

University of Göttingen | GAUG · Institute of Computer Science

It is well-known that wireless links are error-prone and require retransmissions for recovering frames from errors and losses. Network coding (NC) has been proposed for more efficient MAC-layer retransmissions in WLANs. However, existing schemes employed the reception report mechanism, which is both inefficient and expensive. Furthermore, they cons...

Data center containers are regarded as the basic units to build mega data centers. In practice, heterogeneity exists among data center containers, because of technical innovation and vendor diversity. In this paper, we propose uFix, a scalable, flexible and modularized network architecture to interconnect heterogeneous data center containers. The i...

Online microblogging services, as exemplified by Twitter [9] and Yammer [12], have become immensely popular during the latest three years. Twitter, the most successful mi-croblogging service, has attracted more than 41.7 million users as of July 2009 [25] and is still growing fast. However, current microblogging systems severely suffer from perfor-...

In order to minimize user perceived latency while ensuring high data availability, cloud applications desire to select servers from one of the multiple data centers (i.e., server clusters) in different geographical locations, which are able to provide desired services with low latency and low cost. This paper presents CloudGPS, a new server selecti...

Inferring people’s Socioeconomic Attributes (SEAs), including income, occupation, and education level, is an important problem for both social sciences and many networked applications like targeted advertising and personalized recommendation. Previous works mainly focus on estimating SEAs from peoples’ cyberspace behaviors and relationships, such a...

Cloud providers deployed dozens of PoPs and data centers globally to serve billions of geo-distributed users. The traffic management at peering edges has become a key capability of cloud network operators to meet the diverse demands of users. With the rapid growth of cloud applications, users have recently announced new performance requirements, e....

Nowadays, the emerging short video streaming applications have gained substantial attention. With the rapidly burgeoning demand for short video streaming services, maximizing their Quality of Experience (QoE) is an onerous challenge. Current video preloading algorithms cannot determine video preloading sequence decisions appropriately due to the im...

Truck-drone systems, wherein trucks carrying drones drive to pre-planned positions and then free drones equipped with cameras to monitor a known number of objects with reported positions, have been used for various scenarios. An object's quality of monitoring (QoM) by a camera is defined as a function of camera focal length and monitoring distance....

Various stakeholders, such as researchers, government agencies, businesses, and laboratories require reliable scientific research outcomes and patent data to support their work. These data are crucial for advancing scientific research, conducting business evaluations, and policy analysis. However, collecting such data is often a time-consuming and...

Applying the serverless paradigm to edge computing improves edge resource utilization while bringing the benefits of flexible scaling and pay-as-you-go to latency-sensitive applications. This extends the boundaries of serverless computing and improves the quality of service for Function-as-a-Service users. However, as an emerging cloud computing pa...

Video analytics is widespread in various applications serving our society. Recent advances of content enhancement in video analytics offer significant benefits for the bandwidth saving and accuracy improvement. However, existing content-enhanced video analytics systems are excessively computa-tionally expensive and provide extremely low throughput....

The quality of the video stream is the key to neural network-based video analytics. However, low-quality video is inevitably collected by existing surveillance systems because of poor-quality cameras or over-compressed/pruned video streaming protocols, e.g., as a result of upstream bandwidth limit. To address this issue, existing studies use qualit...

Video analytics is widespread in various applications serving our society. Recent advances of content enhancement in video analytics offer significant benefits for the bandwidth saving and accuracy improvement. However, existing content-enhanced video analytics systems are excessively computationally expensive and provide extremely low throughput....

This perspective paper introduces a novel framework for container orchestration called CODECO. The CODECO orchestration framework relies on a data-network-computing approach to define the best infrastructure that can support the operation of next-generation Internet applications across a mobile, heterogeneous Edge-Cloud continuum. The selection of...

Video analytics play a pivotal role in enhancing the safety of intelligent surveillance and autonomous driving. However, the transmission of vast video data and the computational demands of video analytics present challenges within traditional cloud computing paradigms. To address latency concerns, dynamic video analytics often leverage edge deploy...

The 360-degree video streaming service provides a unique immersive viewing experience for users, who can freely change their Field-of-View (FoV) to view different portions of the videos. However, the demands for high throughput and low latency for 360-degree video pose substantial challenges to the current network infrastructure. Super Resolution (...

With the flourishing of global services, low-latency analytics on large-volume geo-distributed data has been a regular requirement for application decision-making. Serverless computing, with its rapid function start-up and lightweight deployment, provides a compelling way for geo-distributed analytics. However, existing research focuses on elastic...

This document represents the Proceedings of the 2023 International Conference on the Network of the Future, that was held on October 4-6, 2023, in Izmir Turkey. Since its creation in 2010, NoF has been a premier annual conference that covers advances in the area of Future Internet design, with emphasis on enabling technologies, architectures and se...

This paper aims to investigate whether online private supplementary education, also known as shadow education, can alleviate educational inequality and what types of mechanisms can help alleviate it. We investigate this using an online learning platform dataset (3,603 anonymous students from China) with additional data from multiple sources and emp...

Welcome to the 3rd issue of the 4th volume of the Journal of Social Computing, a blend of excellence featuring a compelling special section and an array of regular papers. In this issue, we delve into the special section on Assessing Sentience of AI Systems (only part I here; part II will appear in the 4th issue of the 4th volume), curated by Rumma...

Communication is supposed to improve multi-agent collaboration and overall performance in cooperative Multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL). However, such improvements are prevalently limited in practice since most existing communication schemes ignore communication overheads (e.g., communication delays). In this paper, we demonstrate that igno...

The papers in this special issue focus on the novel area of the interplay between edge computing and artificial intelligence (AI) for 6G mobile communicaton networks. While 5G mobile communication has gradually opened the curtain of internet of everything and brings vertical transform to change the society, 6G is believed to open a new era of “Inte...

The increasingly built intercity transportation enables people to visit surrounding cities conveniently. Hence it is becoming a hot research topic to predict where a traveler would visit in a surrounding city based on check-in data collected from location-based mobile Apps. However, as most users rarely travel out of hometown, there is a high skew...

The efficacy of Network Function Virtualization (NFV) depends critically on (1) where the virtual network functions (VNFs) are placed and (2) how the traffic is routed. Unfortunately, these aspects are not easily optimized, especially under time-varying network states with different QoS requirements. Given the importance of NFV, many approaches hav...

The quality of the video stream is key to neural network-based video analytics. However, low-quality video is inevitably collected by existing surveillance systems because of poor quality cameras or over-compressed/pruned video streaming protocols, e.g., as a result of upstream bandwidth limit. To address this issue, existing studies use quality en...

The quality of the video stream is key to neural network-based video analytics. However, low-quality video is inevitably collected by existing surveillance systems because of poor quality cameras or over-compressed/pruned video streaming protocols, e.g., as a result of upstream bandwidth limit. To address this issue, existing studies use quality en...

Location-Based Services (LBS) have been prosperous owing to technological advancements of smart devices. Analyzing location-based user-generated data is a helpful way to understand human mobility patterns, further fueling applications such as recommender systems and urban computing. This dataset documents user activities of location-based services...

Rule-based fine-grained IP geolocation methods are hard to generalize in computer networks which do not follow hypothetical rules. Recently, deep learning methods, like multi-layer perceptron (MLP), are tried to increase generalization capabilities. However, MLP is not so suitable for graph-structured data like networks. MLP treats IP addresses as...

The rapid growth of mobile video traffic and user demand poses a more stringent requirement for efficient bandwidth allocation in mobile networks where multiple users may share a bottleneck link. This provides content providers an opportunity to jointly optimize multiple users’ experiences but users often suffer short connection durations and frequ...

Cooperative intelligence (CI) is expected to become an integral element in next-generation networks because it can aggregate the capabilities and intelligence of multiple devices. Multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) is a popular approach for achieving CI in communication problems by enabling effective collaboration among agents to address seq...

Communication is supposed to improve multi-agent collaboration and overall performance in cooperative Multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL). However, such improvements are prevalently limited in practice since most existing communication schemes ignore communication overheads (e.g., communication delays). In this paper, we demonstrate that igno...

With the rapid development of the Internet, more and more computing-intensive applications with high requirements on computing delay and energy consumption have emerged. Recently, the use of mobile-edge computing servers for auxiliary computing is considered as an effective way to reduce latency and energy consumption. In addition, applications suc...

Objective Side effects in the psychotherapy are sometimes unavoidable. Therapists play a significant role in the side effects of psychotherapy, but there have been few quantitative studies on the mechanisms by which therapists contribute to them. Methods We designed the psychotherapy Side Effects Questionnaire-Therapist Version (PSEQ-T) and releas...

Many hardware-based security middleboxes have been deployed in the networks to defend against different threats. However, these hardware middleboxes are hard to upgrade or migrate. The emergence of network functions virtualization (NFV), which realizes various security functions in the form of virtual network functions (VNFs), brings many benefits...

Quantum entanglement brings high-speed and inherently privacy-preserving transmission for information communication in quantum networks. The qubit scarcity is an important issue that cannot be ignored in quantum networks due to the limited storage capacity of quantum devices, the short lifespan of qubits, and so on. In this article, we first formul...

NFV enables to replace dedicated hardware implementations with software instances and it provides more possibilities for large cost savings, high flexibility and scalability, short deployment cycles, etc. These advantages of NFV makes it very promising to become network provisioning service paradigm in the next generation. This book focuses on a de...

Chapters 3–5 transform the VNF placement and traffic routing proble into some well-known NP-hard problems, and then a heuristic or approximation method is proposed to solve it, at the expense of ignoring the network state dynamics. To bridge that gap, in this chapter, we formulate the VNF placement and traffic routing problem as a Markov Decision P...

In this chapter, we focus on resource allocation problems formulation and analysis, including the basic problem definition and analysis, QoS models in NFV, and Resource Allocation in NFV.

While virtual network function scheduling in the previous chapter assume deterministic link delay and bandwidth, the real-life network usually behaves in a stochastic manner, due to e.g., inaccurate data, expired exchanged information, insufficient estimation to the network. Motivated by this, we consider the stochastic NFV networks in this chapter...

As noted before, resource allocation problem in NFV can be fomulated as an Integer Nonlinear Programming (INLP). And the most frequent approaches to deal with NFV resource allocation include combinatorial optimization theory (e.g., randomized/LP rounding, primal-dual approximation), Deep Reinforcement Learning, Game theory, etc. In this chapter, we...

As noted before, the VNF placement and routing problem can be addressed with the goal of minimizing the maximum link load ratio and each user’s requested delay is satisfied. However, in addition to requested delay, resiliency is also an important Service Level Agreements (SLA) in a NFV service. In this chapter, we first investigate how to quantitat...

As one of the six official languages in the United Nations, Chinese language has received high attention. This paper studies a broad range of aspects related to international Chinese education (ICE) and develops an ICE index ranking system which assesses a set of indicators with their relevance to 33 aspects in 3 dimensions and 9 level-2 indicators...

Numerous applications in 3D underwater sensor networks (UWSNs), such as pollution detection, disaster prevention, animal monitoring, navigation assistance, and submarines tracking, heavily rely on accurate localization techniques. However, due to the limited batteries of sensor nodes and the difficulty for energy harvesting in UWSNs, it is challeng...

The rapid growth of mobile video traffic and user demand poses a more stringent requirement for efficient bandwidth allocation in mobile networks where multiple users may share a bottleneck link. This provides content providers an opportunity to optimize multiple users' experiences jointly, but users often suffer short connection durations and freq...

Artificial intelligence (AI) has been introduced in communication networks and services to improve efficiency via self-optimization. Cooperative intelligence (CI), also known as collective intelligence and collaborative intelligence, is expected to become an integral element in next-generation networks because it can aggregate the capabilities and...

Predicting individual socioeconomic status (SES) from social media content benefits various applications in economic and social fields. Most previous works adopt machine learning methods with predefined features to infer SES. Nevertheless, they ignore some important information of social media content, such as order, structure and relation informat...

In the traditional video streaming service provisioning paradigm, viewers typically request video content through a central Content Delivery Network (CDN) server. However, because of the uncertain wide area network delays, the (remote) viewers usually suffer from long video streaming delay, which affects the quality of experience. Multi-Access Edge...

Inferring individual human mobility at a given time is not only beneficial for personalized location-based services but also crucial for tracking trajectory of the confirmed cases in the COVID-19 pandemic. However, individual-generated trajectory data from mobile Apps are characterized by implicit feedback, which means only a few individual-locatio...

Network Function Virtualization (NFV) provides the possibility to implement complex network functions from dedicated hardware to software instances called Virtual Network Functions (VNF) by leveraging the virtualization technology. Service Function Chaining (SFC) is defined as a chain-ordered set of placed VNFs that handles the traffic of the deliv...

Background: Side effects in psychotherapy are sometimes unavoidable. Therapists play a significant role in the side effects of psychotherapy, but there have been few quantitative studies on the mechanisms by which therapists contribute to them. Methods: We designed the Psychotherapy Side Effects Questionnaire-Therapist Version (PSEQ-T) and released...

Predicting where people will consume in the future is of great significance for promoting local business. Although the prevalence of Geo-Social Networks (GSNs) has provided sufficient and desirable geo-tagged data for user mobility modeling, most studies attempt to directly fit user’s preference toward locations through exploring the complex intera...

Recently, the advancement of machine learning (ML) techniques, especially deep learning, reinforcement learning, and federated learning, has led to remarkable breakthroughs in a variety of application domains. The success of ML benefits from the advancement of the Internet, mobile networks, data center networks, and the Internet of Things (IoT) tha...

Many organizations nowadays have multiple sites at different geographic locations. Typically, transmitting massive data among these sites relies on the interconnection service offered by ISPs. Segment Routing over IPv6 (SRv6) is a new simple and flexible source routing solution which could be leveraged to enhance interconnection services. Compared...

Heterogeneous information network (HIN) embedding, learning the low-dimensional representation of multi-type nodes, has been applied widely and achieved excellent performance. However, most of the previous works focus more on static heterogeneous networks or learning node embedding within specific snapshots, and seldom attention has been paid to th...

Identifying an unfamiliar caller’s profession is important to protect citizens’ personal safety and property. Owing to limited data protection of various popular online services in some countries, such as taxi hailing and ordering takeouts, many users presently encounter an increasing number of phone calls from strangers. The situation may be aggra...

The Bulk Synchronous Parallel (BSP) paradigm is gaining tremendous importance recently due to the popularity of computations as distributed machine learning and graph computation. In a typical BSP job, multiple workers concurrently conduct iterative computations, where frequent synchronization is required. Therefore, the workers should be scheduled...

Understanding commuters’ behavior and influencing factors becomes more and more important every day. With the steady increase of the number of commuters, commuter traffic becomes a major bottleneck for many cities. Commuter behavior consequently plays an increasingly important role in city and transport planning and policy making. Although prior st...

Dear readers, It is our pleasure to welcome you to the second issue of the second volume of the Journal of Social Computing. This issue comprises the following six unique articles.

Online social networks (OSNs) have become a commodity in our daily life. As an important concept in sociology and viral marketing, the study of social influence has received a lot of attentions in academia. Most of the existing proposals work well on dominant OSNs, such as Twitter, since these sites are mature and many users have generated a large...

BACKGROUND Side effects in psychotherapy are sometimes unavoidable. Therapists play a significant role in the side effects of psychotherapy, but there have been few quantitative studies on the mechanisms by which therapists contribute to them. OBJECTIVE Using machine learning techniques to distinguish therapists with and without the perception of...