We focus on the deployment of large scale Edge Computing (EC) infrastructure, which requires substantial capital and operational costs. The Infrastructure Providers (InPs) are reluctant to make these investments, as the revenues from edge services, e.g., augmented reality, may be mainly captured by the respective Service Providers (SPs), and not the InPs. This is the main reason for the limited deployment of EC. We tackle this economic aspect by proposing a co-investment strategy, in which all players, i.e., one InP and multiple SPs, form a coalition to deploy an optimal amount of resources, dynamically allocate them over an investment period, and fairly share costs and revenues. The major challenge is to ensure that the coalition is stable, i.e., the co-investment is profitable for all players under uncertainty of revenues, which comes from the uncertainty of future user demand. We address this challenge with a novel stochastic coalitional game formulation, which allows us to analytically compute a lower bound on the probability that the grand coalition is stable. Numerical results show a large value for the lower bound, even with high levels of uncertainty, provided that the number of SPs is relatively small, their loads are comparable, and the investment period is long enough.

We propose in this paper a coinvestment plan between several stakeholders of different types, namely a physical network owner, operating network nodes, e.g. a network operator or a tower company, and a set of service providers willing to use these resources to provide services as video streaming, augmented reality, autonomous driving assistance, etc. One such scenario is that of deployment of Edge Computing resources. Indeed, although the latter technology is ready, the high Capital Expenditure (CAPEX) cost of such resources is the barrier to its deployment. For this reason, a solid economical framework to guide the investment and the returns of the stakeholders is key to solve this issue. We formalize the coinvestment framework using coalitional game theory. We provide a solution to calculate how to divide the profits and costs among the stakeholders, taking into account their characteristics: traffic load, revenues, utility function. We prove that it is always possible to form the grand coalition composed of all the stakeholders, by showing that our game is convex. We derive the payoff of the stakeholders using the Shapley value concept, and elaborate on some properties of our game. We show our solution in simulation.

Power line communications networks (PLCNs) facilitate efficient power management, data access, and monitoring services over a home area network by using a network implementation taking advantage of the built-in power cable infrastructure. A control station with which attached user stations communicate over the power line is used to coordinate the communications process. As serious distortion and losses are incurred by signals that are transmitted across the power line, it is highly desirable to employ relay stations to support the transmission of such data flows. Yet, to date, only limited research results are available for the cross-layer synthesis and management of such a relay-aided power line communications system. In this paper, we develop and study a relay backbone synthesis algorithm (RBSA) that is used to configure the PLC network topology, allowing active source stations to efficiently transport their message flows to the control station. We also present a relay backbone synthesis algorithm under fixed-topology (RBSAF) that enables the system management mechanism to jointly activate selective relay stations and schedule their sharing of the PLC medium, when considering nonadjustable PLC network topologies. Our new computationally efficient RBSA and RBSAF schemes are proven numerically to achieve throughput rates close to the optimal solution.

The eco-system of content distribution services is evolving fast and the coalition of content distribution players represents a main aspect of ongoing moves. In this paper, we provide an approach, based on a centralized control architecture, for deciding how coalitions should be established and provisioned in order to address the requirements of a market defined by a set of content providers. In particular, we propose an optimization model that allows taking decisions of coalition establishment as well as of load distribution among members of the established coalitions. This model capture performance, capacity and economic welfare considerations. We instantiate the proposed model to represent a novel use case related to the coalition of distinct Telcos owning content delivery infrastructures and located within the same country. We demonstrate that, through putting together their content delivery resources and making use of their existing peering connections, local Telcos can increase their individual revenues.

The adoption of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and semantic Web technologies in the Internet of Things (IoT) enables to enhance the interoperability of devices by abstracting their capabilities as services and to enrich their descriptions with machine-interpretable semantics. This facilitates the discovery and composition of IoT services. The increasing number of IoT services, their dynamicity and geographical distribution require mechanisms to enable scalable and efficient discovery. We propose in this paper a semantic based IoT service discovery system that supports and adapts to the dynamicity of IoT services. The discovery is distributed over a hierarchy of semantic gateways. Within a semantic gateway, we implement mechanisms to dynamically organize its content over time, in order to minimize the discovery cost. Results show that our approach enables to maintain a scalable and efficient discovery and limits the number of updates sent to a neighboring gateway.

In this paper, we propose a two-layered parking lot management system for charging scheduling of electric vehicles (EVs) considering a realistic vehicular mobility pattern. EVs are categorized in two groups based on their mobility patterns: Regular EVs and Irregular EVs. We use the data from an vehicular mobility trace collected from the Canton of Zurich for the regular EVs and a probabilistic pattern built on top of this Zurich trace aiming at modeling the behavior of irregular EVs. To the extend of our knowledge, this is the first EV charging scheduling study in the literature that utilizes a big-scale realistic vehicular mobility trace. The performance of the proposed system is compared with well-known routine unaware scheduling mechanisms (e.g., First Come First Serve) with regard to maximizing the parking lot revenue. Our results show that, our proposed system outperforms well-known routine unaware scheduling mechanisms and it is evident that real environments would benefit from using such parking lot management systems in Smart Cities.

In this paper, a novel mobility anchor point (MAP) selection scheme based on location history is proposed for Hierarchical MIPv6 networks. Considering mobile nodes (MNs) moving fast but only within a limited region, a new parameter, called location rate, is defined in our scheme to represent the number of different access routers the MN has previously attached to in unit time on average. A compound variable, consisting of the location rate and some other MN-related parameters, is derived and used to compare with a group of network-related thresholds, so that MAPs with minimum total costs (containing binding update cost and packet tunneling cost) for different MNs could be selected. Simulations with a modified random walk mobility model show that our scheme has good and steady performance for selecting low-cost MAPs in different situations, while other schemes (e.g. furthest, nearest, mobility- based and session-to-mobility ratio based) are only suitable for certain cases. Besides, the use of the compound variable and the group of thresholds simplifies the selection procedure, so MNs don't need to do any complex calculation of MAPs' total costs.

This paper presents a stochastic geometry model for the performance analysis and the planning of dense IEEE 802.11 networks. This model allows one to propose heuristic formulas for various properties of such networks like the probability for users to be covered, the probability for access points to be granted access to the channel or the average long term throughput provided to end-users. The main merit of this model is to take the effect of interferences and that of CSMA into account within this dense network context. This analytic model, which is based on Matern point processes, is partly validated against simulation. It is then used to assess various properties of such networks. We show for instance how the long term throughput obtained by end-users behaves when the access point density increases. We also briefly show how to use this model for the planning of managed networks and for the economic modeling of unplanned networks.

Despite an observable trend in reducing the number of layers in core and metropolitan area networks, still the optimal design of multi-layer networks (like IP over WDM) remains an important issue as a means to reduce CAPEX and OPEX. In multi-layer networks, usually a connection oriented transport network (like WDM) is used to deploy a layout for optimal transport of traffic. In today's networks, the layouts are based on point to point LSPs. We will show here that by using a novel concept named bus-LSPs, we can achieve some significant savings for the operator, both in terms of CAPEX and OPEX. We also introduce a heuristic algorithm to design optimal layouts, and provide a quantitative evaluation

Although there is a trend in reducing the number of layers in core and metropolitan area networks, still the optimal design of multilayer networks (like IP over WDM) remains a main issue as a mean to reduce CAPEX and OPEX. In multilayer networks, usually a connection oriented network (like WDM) is used to deploy a layout for the optimal transport of the traffic. In present GMPLS networks, the layouts are based on point to point LSPs. We introduce here an unexplored type of LSP (more precisely of TE link), based on a unidirectional bus concept, allowing reducing the cost of the network as well as the layout complexity. The benefits of the concept are qualitatively and quantitatively evaluated.

To this day, traffic in cellular networks is still mainly real-time. However, with the deployment of new technologies, such as HDR (High Date Rate) and HSDPA (High Speed Downlink Packet Access), this situation is bound to evolve rapidly and elastic traffic will significantly increase. These novel technologies implement opportunistic scheduling, taking advantage of the delay-tolerance of elastic traffic, to augment the global capacity of the system. Previous work has shown that "Proportional Fair" (PF) is an opportunistic scheduler that provides a good compromise between fairness and efficiency. Nevertheless, the hypotheses according to which these results are obtained are not always valid in real environments. In this paper, we propose a modified version of PF that not only introduces flexibility in sharing resources between active users but also allows for a fair allocation of resources in realistic environments.

The ongoing evolution towards the generalization of wireless access to multi-service networks stresses on the need for optimizing the control of radio resources and in particular, for designing efficient scheduling approaches. The scheduling mechanisms proposed for wireline links do not carry over to wireless interfaces due to the variability of radio links capacity. Efficient schedulers for the radio channel have to take into account information relative to the channel state when allocating resources to the various connected equipments. For the case of delay tolerant traffic, the scheduler may take advantage of terminals diversity. We propose in this paper a modified version of the weighted fair queueing (WFQ) algorithm, termed OWFQ (opportunistic WFQ), that notably increases the average system performance through opportunistic scheduling while fulfilling users' QoS needs in terms of minimum realized throughput.

We consider a heterogeneous sensor network in which nodes are to be deployed over a unit area for the purpose of surveillance. An aircraft visits the area periodically and gathers data about the activity in the area from the sensor nodes. There are two types of nodes that are distributed over the area using two-dimensional homogeneous Poisson point processes; type 0 nodes with intensity (average number per unit area) /spl lambda//sub 0/ and battery energy E/sub 0/; and type 1 nodes with intensity /spl lambda//sub 1/ and battery energy E/sub 1/. Type 0 nodes do the sensing while type 1 nodes act as the cluster heads besides doing the sensing. Nodes use multihopping to communicate with their closest cluster heads. We determine them optimum node intensities (/spl lambda//sub 0/, /spl lambda//sub 1/) and node energies (E/sub 0/, E/sub 1/) that guarantee a lifetime of at least T units, while ensuring connectivity and coverage of the surveillance area with a high probability. We minimize the overall cost of the network under these constraints. Lifetime is defined as the number of successful data gathering trips (or cycles) that are possible until connectivity and/or coverage are lost. Conditions for a sharp cutoff are also taken into account, i.e., we ensure that almost all the nodes run out of energy at about the same time so that there is very little energy waste due to residual energy. We compare the results for random deployment with those of a grid deployment in which nodes are placed deterministically along grid points. We observe that in both cases /spl lambda//sub 1/ scales approximately as /spl radic/(/spl lambda//sub 0/). Our results can be directly extended to take into account unreliable nodes.

The problem of connectivity in multi-hop wireless networks has been extensively studied in the literature and general results for node density requirements have been obtained (P. Gupta and P.R. Kumar, Proc. 37th IEEE Conf. of Decision and Control, 1998). These results have been obtained based on the implicit assumption of a generic routing protocol, capable of exhaustively searching all possible routes, between all pairs of nodes. Hence these results would be too optimistic in several practical cases, where the routing protocols are not generic but optimized for specific applications. In this paper, we provide a framework for defining the appropriate notion of connectivity that reflects the underlying network architecture and protocols. Based on this framework, we define and analyze connectivity requirements for two network architectures proposed in the literature, namely, GAF (geographic adaptive fidelity) with Manhattan routing (Y. Xu et al., Proc. Int. Conf. on Mobile Comp. and Netw., 2001), proposed for ad-hoc networks and AIMRP (address-light integrated MAC and routing protocol) which employs tier-based routing in sensor networks (S.S. Kulkarni et al., submitted for publication in IEEE Trans. on Networking, Dec. 2003). By comparing the critical node density requirements for connectivity, obtained through our framework, with the results in Gupta and Kumar, we show that the earlier results are too optimistic and hence it is important to consider the underlying routing protocol to dimension the density of nodes appropriately.

In this paper we consider two types of sessions: Guaranteed Performance (GP) and point-to-multi point Best Effort (BE). The existence of different types of users sharing the same resource raises the need for a Call Admission Control (CAC) which will enable an efficient use of the shared network. As is commonly done in todays telecommunications network, CAC is assumed to be imposed only on the GP session. We analyse the effect of bandwidth reservation for BE sessions on the performance of the BE sessions (in terms of the expected delay) and of the GP sessions (in terms of their rejection probabilities). Our analysis is based on a matrix-geometric approach.

Multicast routing protocols suitable for wide-area networks are being developed for the Internet. Protocols based on hierarchical trees appear to be well suited for their superior scalability and flexibility. We show how to construct a class of hierarchical multicast trees and we analyze their performances. This study gives insight into how the chosen hierarchical structure impacts the tree performance with respect to network resource consumption. Optimal structures which minimize resource consumption are deduced, which allows for simple dimensioning rules, such as how many hierarchical levels should be used. A stochastic geometric approach turned out to be well adapted for this study. This approach leads to explicit expressions for the average tree cost, as a function of the hierarchical clustering, from which the optimal tree structure can then be easily deduced.

In polling systems that have been studied in the literature, one usually asserts independent Poisson arrivals. This assumption is, however, unrealistic when dealing with many applications, e.g., local area networks (LANs) using token-ring protocols. The arrival processes there may be quite irregular, highly bursty, and correlated. We use the new approach for modeling such arrival streams proposed by Cruz (1991), to obtain strict upper bounds on several performance measures. It is based on characterizing the inputs by bounds on the average arrival rate and the burstiness, and is especially useful in describing the arrival streams that are filtered (policed) by leaky buckets. We first obtain bounds for the gated, exhaustive, and globally-gated service disciplines, and then consider timed token rings (such as the FDDI). The results for the first three disciplines improve the general bounds obtained by Altman, Foss, Riehl and Stidham (see Proceedings of the 14th International Teletraffic Congress, France, p.811-20, June 1994). We further obtain improved exponential bounds of the type introduced by Chang (see IEEE Trans. Automat. Contr., vol.34, no.5, p.913-31, 1994), and Yaron and Sidi (see ibid., vol.1, no.3, p.372-85, 1993) for the globally-gated discipline.