Arogyaswami Paulraj’s research while affiliated with Stanford University and other places

By performing fog computing, a device can offload delay-tolerant, computationally demanding tasks to its peers for processing, and the results can be returned and aggregated. In distributed wireless networks, the challenges of fog computing include lack of central coordination, selfish behaviors of devices, and multi-hop signaling delays which can result in outdated network knowledge and prevent effective cooperations beyond one hop. This paper presents a new approach to enabling cooperations of N selfish devices over multiple hops, where selfish behaviors are discouraged by a tit-for-tat mechanism. The tit-fortat incentive of a device is designed to be the gap between the helps (in terms of energy) the device has received and offered; and indicates how much help the device can offer at the next time slot. The tit-for-tat incentives can be evaluated at every device by having all devices broadcast how much help they offered in the past time slot, and used by all devices to schedule task offloading and processing. The approach achieves asymptotic optimality in a fully distributed fashion with a time-complexity of less than O(N2). The optimality loss resulting from multi-hop signaling delays and consequently outdated tit-for-tat incentives is proved to asymptotically diminish. Simulations show that our approach substantially reduces the time-average energy consumption of the state of the art by 50% and accommodates more tasks, by engaging devices hops away under multi-hop delays.

An emerging trend of next generation communication systems is to provide network edges with additional capabilities such as storage resources in the form of caches to reduce file delivery latency. To investigate this aspect, we study the fundamental limits of a cache-aided broadcast-relay wireless network consisting of one central base station, M cache-equipped transceivers and K receivers from a latency-centric perspective. We use the normalized delivery time (NDT) to capture the per-bit latency for the worst-case file request pattern, normalized with respect to a reference interference-free system with unlimited transceiver cache capabilities. The objective is to design the schemes for cache placement and file delivery in order to minimize the NDT. To this end, we establish a novel converse and two types of achievability schemes applicable to both time-variant and invariant channels. The first scheme is a general one-shot scheme for any M and K that synergistically exploits both multicasting (coded) caching and distributed zero-forcing opportunities. We show that the proposed one-shot scheme (i) attains gains attributed to both individual and collective transceiver caches (ii) is NDT-optimal for various parameter settings, particularly at higher cache sizes. The second scheme, on the other hand, designs beamformers to facilitate both subspace interference alignment and zero-forcing at lower cache sizes. Exploiting both schemes, we are able to characterize for various special cases of M and K which satisfy $K+M\leq 4$ the optimal tradeoff between cache storage and latency. The tradeoff illustrates that the NDT is the preferred choice to capture the latency of a system rather than the commonly used sum degrees-of-freedom (DoF). In fact, our optimal tradeoff refutes the popular belief that increasing cache sizes translates to increasing the achievable sum DoF.

An emerging trend of next generation communication systems is to provide network edges with additional capabilities such as storage resources in the form of caches to reduce file delivery latency. To investigate the impact of this technique on latency, we study the delivery time of a cache-aided broadcast-relay wireless network consisting of one central base station, M cache-equipped transceivers and K receivers under finite precision channel state information (CSI). We use the normalized delivery time (NDT) to capture the worst-case per-bit latency in a file delivery. Lower and upper bounds on the NDT are derived to understand the influence of K,M, cache capacity and channel quality on the NDT. In particular, regimes of NDT-optimality are identified and discussed.

In 5G networks, Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) and Radio Access Network (RAN) slicing can support the evolving services and satisfy the diverse service requirements efficiently, thereby being promising technologies. In this letter, the work is focused on the RAN slicing between MEC services and traditional services. An Information Prediction and Dynamic Programming based RAN Slicing (IP&DP-RS) algorithm is proposed. It guarantees the inter-slice isolation and realizes the intra-slice customization. Furthermore, it can optimize the network utility with high fairness in polynomial time complexity.

An emerging trend of next generation communication systems is to provide network edges with additional capabilities such as additional storage resources in the form of caches to reduce file delivery latency. To investigate this aspect, we study the fundamental limits of a cache-aided wireless network consisting of one central base station, M transceivers and K receivers from a latency-centric perspective. We use the normalized delivery time (NDT) to capture the per-bit latency for the worst-case file request pattern at high signal-to-noise ratios (SNR), normalized with respect to a reference interference-free system with unlimited transceiver cache capabilities. For various special cases with $M=\{1,2\}$ and $K=\{1,2,3\}$ that satisfy $M+K\leq 4$, we establish the optimal tradeoff between cache storage and latency. This is facilitated through establishing a novel converse (for arbitrary M and K) and an achievability scheme on the NDT. Our achievability scheme is a synergistic combination of multicasting, zero-forcing beamforming and interference alignment.

Mobile edge computing (MEC) is of particular interest to Internet of Things (IoT), where inexpensive simple devices can get complex tasks offloaded to and processed at powerful infrastructure. Scheduling is challenging due to stochastic task arrivals and wireless channels, congested air interface, and more prominently, prohibitive feedbacks from thousands of devices. In this paper, we generate asymptotically optimal schedules tolerant to out-of-date network knowledge, thereby relieving stringent requirements on feedbacks. A perturbed Lyapunov function is designed to stochastically maximize a network utility balancing throughput and fairness. A knapsack problem is solved per slot for the optimal schedule, provided up-to-date knowledge on the data and energy backlogs of all devices. The knapsack problem is relaxed to accommodate out-of-date network states. Encapsulating the optimal schedule under up-to-date network knowledge, the solution under partial out-of-date knowledge preserves asymptotic optimality, and allows devices to self-nominate for feedback. Corroborated by simulations, our approach is able to dramatically reduce feedbacks at no cost of optimality. The number of devices that need to feed back is reduced to less than 60 out of a total of 5000 IoT devices.

In this paper, we propose an opportunistic downlink interference alignment (ODIA) for interference-limited cellular downlink, which intelligently combines user scheduling and downlink IA techniques. The proposed ODIA not only efficiently reduces the effect of inter-cell interference from other-cell base stations (BSs) but also eliminates intra-cell interference among spatial streams in the same cell. We show that the minimum number of users required to achieve a target degrees-of-freedom (DoF) can be fundamentally reduced, i.e., the fundamental user scaling law can be improved by using the ODIA, compared with the existing downlink IA schemes. In addition, we adopt a limited feedback strategy in the ODIA framework, and then analyze the number of feedback bits required for the system with limited feedback to achieve the same user scaling law of the ODIA as the system with perfect CSI. We also modify the original ODIA in order to further improve sum-rate, which achieves the optimal multiuser diversity gain, i.e., $\log\log N$, per spatial stream even in the presence of downlink inter-cell interference, where N denotes the number of users in a cell. Simulation results show that the ODIA significantly outperforms existing interference management techniques in terms of sum-rate in realistic cellular environments. Note that the ODIA operates in a non-collaborative and decoupled manner, i.e., it requires no information exchange among BSs and no iterative beamformer optimization between BSs and users, thus leading to an easier implementation.