In the hardware design space exploration process, it is critical to optimize both hardware parameters and algorithm-to-hardware mappings. Previous work has largely approached this simultaneous optimization problem by separately exploring the hardware design space and the mapspace—both individually large and highly nonconvex spaces—independently. The resulting combinatorial explosion has created significant difficulties for optimizers.

The hardware design space is high-dimensional and discrete. Systematic and efficient exploration of this space has been a significant challenge. Central to this problem is the intractable search complexity that grows exponentially with the design choices and the discrete nature of the search space. This work investigates the feasibility of learning a meaningful low-dimensional continuous representation for hardware designs to reduce such complexity and facilitate the search process. We devise a variational autoencoder (VAE)-based design space exploration framework called VAESA, to encode the hardware design space in a compact and continuous representation. We show that black-box and gradient-based design space exploration algorithms can be applied to the latent space, and design points optimized in the latent space can be reconstructed to high-performance realistic hardware designs. Our experiments show that performing the design space search on the latent space consistently leads to the optimal design point under a fixed number of samples. In addition, the latent space can improve the sample efficiency of the original algorithm by 6.8$\times$ and can discover hardware designs that are up to 5% more efficient than the optimal design searched directly in the high-dimensional input space.

HTTP Adaptive bitrate video Streaming (HAS) is now widely adopted by Content Delivery Network Providers (CDNPs) and Telecom Operators (Telcos) to improve user Quality of Experience (QoE). In HAS, several versions of videos are made available in the network so that the quality of the video can be chosen to better fit the bandwidth capacity of users. These delivery requirements raise new challenges with respect to content caching strategies, since several versions of the content may compete to be cached. In this paper we present analysis of a real HAS dataset collected in France and provided by a mobile telecom operator involving more than 485,000 users requesting adaptive video contents through more than 8 million video sessions over a 6 week measurement period. Firstly, we propose a fine-grained definition of content popularity by exploiting the segmented nature of video streams. We also provide analysis about the behavior of clients when requesting such HAS streams. We propose novel caching policies tailored for chunk-based streaming. Then we study the relationship between the requested video bitrates and radio constraints. Finally, we study the users' patterns when selecting different bitrates of the same video content. Our findings provide useful insights that can be leveraged by the main actors of video content distribution to improve their content caching strategy for adaptive streaming contents as well as to model users' behavior in this context.