In this work, we investigate information freshness in a status update communication system consisting of a source-destination link. Initially, we study the properties of a sample path of the age of information (AoI) process at the destination. We obtain a general formula of the stationary distribution of the AoI, under the assumption of ergodicity. We relate this result to a discrete time queueing system and provide a general expression of the generating function of AoI in relation with the system time and the peak age of information (PAoI) metric. Furthermore, we consider three different single-server system models and we obtain closed-form expressions of the generating functions and the stationary distributions of the AoI and the PAoI. The first model is a first-come-first-served (FCFS) queue, the second model is a preemptive last-come-first-served (LCFS) queue, and the last model is a bufferless system with packet dropping. We build upon these results to provide a methodology for analyzing general non-linear age functions for this type of systems, using representations of functions as power series.

We study a discrete-time wireless network that serves both cacheable and non-cacheable traffic with assistance of a relay node with storage capabilities for both types of traffic. We investigate how allocating the storage capacity to cacheable and non-cacheable traffic affects the network throughput. Our numerical results provide useful insights by varying not only the allocation of cacheable to non-cacheable storage but also the rate by which non-cacheable content is transmitted, the rate by which cacheable content is requested, as well as different popularity distributions of the cached files.

This paper considers a status update communication system consisting of a source-destination link with timeliness requirements. First, we study the properties of a sample path of the age of information (AoI) process at the destination. Under the assumption of ergodicity, we obtain a general formula of the stationary distribution of the AoI. We relate this result to a discrete time queueing system and provide a general expression of the generating function of AoI in relation with the system time and the peak age of information (PAoI). Furthermore, we consider the first-come-first-served (FCFS) Geo/Geo/1 queue and we obtain closed-form expressions of the generating functions and the stationary distributions of the AoI and the PAoI. We built upon these results to provide a methodology for analyzing general non-linear age functions for this type of systems.

The challenge of how cities can be designed and developed in an inclusive and sustainable direction is monumental. Smart city technologies currently offer the most promising solution for long-term sustainability. However, smart city projects have been criticised for ignoring diverse needs of the local population and increasing social divides. A sustainable urban environment depends as much on creating an inclusive space that is safe, accessible and comfortable for a diverse group of citizens as it does on deploying “smart” technologies for energy efficiency or environmental protection. This is because citizens will be more likely to adopt technologies promoting sustainability if they are well-aligned with their lived needs and experiences. In this paper, we present the rationale behind an ongoing interdisciplinary research project that aims to address exactly the problem outlined above by using a participatory design approach. Focusing on a smart city test site in Sweden where sensors are currently being deployed to collect data on noise, particles, vehicle numbers and types (amongst other), the goal is to bring local residents and government representatives into dialogue with technical developers by adopting a “meet-in-the-middle” approach. This paper comprises a brief presentation of early findings and a reflection on this approach.

We consider a status update communication system consisting of a source-destination link. A stochastic process is observed at the source, where samples are extracted at random time instances, and delivered to the destination, thus, providing status updates for the source. In this paper, we expand the concept of information ageing by introducing the cost of update delay (CoUD) metric to characterize the cost of having stale information at the destination. The CoUD captures the freshness of the information at the destination and can be used to reflect the information structure of the source. Moreover, we introduce the value of information of update (VoIU) metric that captures the reduction of CoUD upon reception of an update. Using the CoUD, its by-product metric called peak cost of update delay (PCoUD), and the VoIU, we evaluate the performance of an M/M/1 system in various settings that consider exact expressions and bounds. The optimal server utilization policy is to minimize the time average CoUD and maximize the time average VoIU. Our results indicate that the performance of CoUD differs depending on the cost assigned per time unit, however the optimal policy remains the same for linear ageing and varies for non-linear ageing. When it comes to the VoIU the performance difference appears only when the cost increases non-linearly with time. The study illustrates the importance of the newly introduced variants of age, furthermore supported in the case of VoIU by its tractability.

We consider a system consisting of a source-destination communication link. At the transmitter of the source there is a buffer that stores packets containing status information. These randomly generated packets should keep the destination timely updated and they can be discarded to avoid wasting network resources for the transmission of stale information. In this setup, we provide an analysis of the age of information (AoI) and peak age of information (PAoI) performance of the system, with and without packet management at the transmission queue of the source node. The analysis indicates the potential performance gains obtained with the use of packet management.

In this work, we evaluate a wireless system in which we distinguish between cacheable and non-cacheable traffic. More specifically, we consider a general system in which a wireless user with limited cache storage requests cacheable content from a data center that can be directly accessed through a base station. The user can be assisted by a pair of wireless helpers that exchange non-cacheable content. Packets arrive at the queue of the source helper in bursts. Each helper has its own caches to assist the user's requests for cacheable content. Files not available from the helpers are transmitted by the base station. We analyze the system throughput and the delay experienced by the user and show how they are affected by the packet arrival rate at the source helper, the availability of caching helpers, the caches' parameters, and the user's request rate by means of numerical results.

The next generation of mobile networks, namely 5G, together with the Internet of Things (IoT) come with a large number of delay sensitive services. To meet their requirements, cloud services are migrating to the edge of the networks to reduce latency. The notion of fog computing, where the edge plays an active role in the execution of services, comes to meet the needs for the stringent requirements. Thus, it becomes of a high importance to address the problem of mapping services' demands to infrastructure resources supply. This work addresses it taking into account the randomness of resource availability in a fog infrastructure. We introduce an integer optimization formulation to minimize the total cost under a guarantee of service execution despite the uncertainty of resources availability. Our results illustrate the effect of various system parameters, such as the diversity of the infrastructure server set, the availability of different infrastructure servers in the set, and the probability of service completion required by each service.

Wireless devices need to adapt their transmission power according to the fluctuating wireless channel in order to meet constraints of delay sensitive applications. In this paper, we consider delay sensitivity in the form of strict packet deadlines arriving in a transmission queue. Packets missing the deadline while in the queue are dropped from the system. We aim at minimizing the packet drop rate under average power constraints. We utilize tools from Lyapunov optimization to find an approximate solution by selecting power allocation. We evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithm and show that it achieves the same performance in terms of packet drop rate with that of the Earliest Deadline First (EDF) when the available power is sufficient. However, our algorithm outperforms EDF regarding the trade-off between packet drop rate and average power consumption.

We consider a cognitive shared access scheme consisting of a high priority primary node and a low priority network with N secondary nodes accessing the spectrum. Assuming bursty traffic at the primary node, saturated queues at the secondary nodes, and multipacket reception capabilities at the receivers, we derive analytical expressions of the time average age of information of the primary node and the throughput of the secondary nodes. We formulate two optimization problems, the first aiming to minimize the time average age of information of the primary node subject to an aggregate secondary throughput requirement. The second problem aims to maximize the aggregate secondary throughput of the network subject to a maximum time average staleness constraint. Our results provide guidelines for the design of a multiple access system with multipacket reception capabilities that fulfills both timeliness and throughput requirements.

In this paper, we consider the two-user broadcast channel and we characterize its stable throughput region. We start the analysis by providing the stability region for the general case without any specific considerations on transmission and reception mechanisms. We also provide conditions for the stable throughput region to be convex. Subsequently, we study the case where the transmitter uses superposition coding and we consider two special cases for the receivers. The first one is when both receivers treat interference as noise. The second is when the user with a better channel uses successive decoding and the other receiver treats interference as noise.

In this paper, we study the stability region of the two-user broadcast channel (BC) with bursty data arrivals and security constraints. It is assumed that one of the receivers has a secrecy constraint, i.e., its packets need to be kept secret from the other receiver, which is defined based on signal to interference noise ratio. The receiver with secrecy constraint has full-duplex capability to send a jamming signal for improving its service rate. The stability region of the two-user BC with secrecy constraint is characterized for the general decoding case. Then, assuming two different decoding schemes, the respective stability regions are derived. The full-duplex operation of receiver results in self-interference, and the effect of imperfect self-interference cancelation on the stability region is also investigated. The stability region of the BC with a secrecy constraint, where the receivers do not have full duplex capability can be obtained as a special case of the results derived in this paper. In addition, the paper considers the problem of maximizing the saturated throughput of the queue for which there is no secrecy constraint under minimum service guarantees for the other queue. The results provide new insights on the effect of the secrecy constraint on the stability region of the BC. It is found that the stability region with secrecy constraint is sensitive to the degree of self-interference cancelation.

In this paper, we analyze a shared access network with a fixed primary node and randomly distributed secondary nodes whose spatial distribution follows a poisson point process. The secondary nodes use a random access protocol allowing them to access the channel with probabilities that depend on the queue size of the primary node. Assuming a system with multipacket reception receivers, having bursty packet arrivals at the primary and saturated traffic at the secondary nodes, our protocol can be tuned to alleviate congestion at the primary. We analyze the throughput of the secondary network and the primary average delay, as well as the impact of the secondary node access probability and transmit power. We formulate an optimization problem to maximize the throughput of the secondary network under delay constraints for the primary node; in the case of no congestion control, the optimal access probability can be provided in closed form. Our numerical results illustrate the effect of network operating parameters on the performance of the proposed priority-based shared access protocol.

We consider a real-time status update system consisting of a source-destination network. A stochastic process is observed at the source, and samples, so called status updates, are extracted at random time instances, and delivered to the destination. In this paper, we expand the concept of information ageing by introducing the Cost of Update Delay (CoUD) metric to characterize the cost of having stale information at the destination. We introduce the Value of Information of Update (VoIU) metric that captures the reduction of CoUD upon reception of an update. The importance of the VoIU metric lies on its tractability which enables an alternative performance criterion in status update systems.

The emerging vision of smart cities necessitates the use of Internet of Things (IoT) network devices to implement sustainable solutions that will improve the operations of urban areas. A massive amount of smart cities services may demand allocation of computational resources, such as processing power or storage, that IoT devices offer. Within this context, we present an IoT network device comprising interfaces with one specific computational resource available. The efficient utilization of available IoT resources would improve the Quality of Service (QoS) of the IoT network that serves the smart city. All resource allocations must be completed within a given scheduling window and every service is parametrized by a pricing weight function to indicate its tolerance to be served at the beginning of the scheduling window. We propose a mathematical optimization formulation to minimize the total cost of allocating all demands within the scheduling window considering the tolerance level of each service at the same time. Moreover, we prove that the problem is computationally hard and we provide numerical results to gain insight into the impact of different pricing weight functions on the allocations' distribution within the scheduling window.

In this work, the stability region of the broadcast channel (BC) is explored, where the receiver, for which the packets need to be kept secret from the other receiver has full-duplex (FD) capability. The effect of self-interference on the stability region has also been investigated. In particular, the stability region is characterized under two types of decoding schemes: (a) both the receivers perform treating interference as noise and (b) receiver with full-duplex capability performs successive decoding and other receiver treats interference as noise. As a by product of the analysis, the stability region of the BC with secrecy constraint where the receivers do not have FD capability can be obtained as a special case of the results derived in this paper. It is found that if the self-interference cancelation at the full-duplex receiver is not efficient, then the gain obtained in secure throughput due to transmission of the jamming signal by the FD receiver can diminish. In particular, it is found that the stability region with secrecy constraint is sensitive to the coefficient of self-interference cancelation under certain cases.

In this paper, we analyze a shared access network with one primary device and randomly distributed smart objects with secondary priority. Assuming random traffic at the primary device and saturated queues at the smart objects with secondary priority, an access protocol is employed to adjust the random access probabilities of the smart objects depending on the congestion level of the primary. We characterize the maximum throughput of the secondary network with respect to delay constraints on the primary. Our results highlight the impact of system design parameters on the delay and throughput behavior of the shared access network with massive number of connected objects.

It is our great pleasure to welcome you to the 5th edition of the successful workshop on the Internet of Things: Smart Objects and Services (IoT-SoS), which is organized this year in conjunction with WoWMoM 2016. The main focus of this wokshop is to bring together experts from the research community, the industry and standardisation bodies and discuss in the context of heterogeneous networking technologies for the Internet of Things (IoT), aiming to identify solutions for addressing the key challenges that IoT brings to the networking domain.

Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices can be equipped with multiple heterogeneous network interfaces. An overwhelmingly large amount of services may demand some or all of these interfaces' available resources. Herein, we present a precise mathematical formulation of assigning services to interfaces with heterogeneous resources in one or more rounds. For reasonable instance sizes, the presented formulation produces optimal solutions for this computationally hard problem. We prove the NP-completeness of the problem and develop two algorithms to approximate the optimal solution for big instance sizes. The first algorithm allocates the most demanding service requirements first, considering the average cost of interfaces' resources. The second one calculates the demanding resource shares and allocates the most demanding of them first by choosing randomly among equally demanding shares. Finally, we provide simulation results giving insight into services splitting over different interfaces for both cases.

The 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) introduced the new radio access technology, LTE (Long Term Evolution) and LTE-Advanced, which has the capability to provide larger bandwidth and low latencies on a wireless network in order to fulfill the demand of Users' Equipment (UEs) with acceptable Quality of Service (QoS). One of the data-heavy applications that has exploded on the market is Video. This calls for accurate modeling of video traffic. To ensure the quality and correctness of complex systems with Video traffic, it is important to evaluate the behavior of the traffic in the heterogeneous environment. This paper presents measurements on LTE Video traffic which were performed in a real environment. We derived a semi-Markov model which accurately reproduces the statistics of composite Video measurements over LTE network.

We consider a system of multiple sources generating status update packets, which need to be sent by a single transmitter to a destination over a network. In the model we study, the packet generation time may vary at each source, and the packets go through the network with a random delay. Each update carries a time stamp of its generation, allowing the destination to calculate for each source the so called Age of Information, which measures the timeliness of each status update arriving. Considering that queuing delay can unnecessarily increase the age of a critical status update, we propose here a queue management technique, in which we maintain a queue with only the latest status packet of each source, overwriting any previously queued update from that source. This simple technique drastically limits the need for buffering and can be applied in systems where the history of source status is not relevant. We show that this scheme results in significantly less transmissions compared to the standard M/M/1 queue model. Furthermore, the proposed technique reduces the per source age of information, especially in settings not using queue management with high status update generation rates.

In this work, we investigate the operation of energy efficient relay nodes assisting the transmission of packets from a number of users to a destination node. We study the impact of switching randomly a fraction of the relays on and off to the aggregate throughput, the average queue size and delay per packet of systems with relays transmitting in either Full- or Half-Duplex mode and under different channel transmissions characteristics. Furthermore, we prove analytically and illustrate via simulation means how these network metrics are affected.

With the densification of nodes in cellular networks, free space optic (FSO) connections are becoming an appealing low cost and high rate alternative to copper and fiber backhaul solutions for wireless communication systems. To ensure a reliable cellular backhaul, provisions for redundant disjoint paths between the nodes must be made in the design phase. This paper aims at finding a cost-effective solution to upgrade the cellular backhaul with pre-deployed optical fibers using FSO links and mirror components. Since the quality of the FSO links depends on several factors, such as transmission distance, power, and weather conditions, we adopt an elaborate formulation to calculate link reliability. We present a novel integer linear programming model to approach optimal FSO backhaul design, guaranteeing $K$-disjoint paths connecting each node pair. Next, we derive a column generation method to a path-oriented mathematical formulation. Applying the method in a sequential manner enables high computational scalability. We use realistic scenarios to demonstrate that our approaches efficiently provide optimal or near-optimal solutions, and thereby allow for accurately dealing with the trade-off between cost and reliability.

The spectrum overcrowding drives investigating solutions to increase the usage of underutilized spectrum bands, minimize redundant interference and maximize expected throughput. Cognitive radio (CR) has presented itself as an appealing technology for solutions in energy constrained devices. Within this context, this paper introduces a system structure which enhances wireless multi-interfaced objects with cognitive radio. We propose a modular architecture to imbue such multi-interfaced devices with cognitive radio features, and based on it we present numerical results which identify performance boundaries and potential energy savings for an adaptive uncoded modulation scheme. Our results show that the tradeoff between throughput and energy consumption can be leveraged satisfactorily to enhance the lifetime significantly in noisy environments.

We consider a set of transmitter-receiver pairs, or links, that share a wireless medium and address the problem of emptying backlogged queues with given initial size at the transmitters in minimum time. The problem amounts to determining activation subsets of links, and their time durations, to form a minimum-time schedule. Scheduling in wireless networks has been studied under various formulations before. In this paper, we present fundamental insights and solution characterizations that include: 1) showing that the complexity of the problem remains high for any continuous and increasing rate function; 2) formulating and proving sufficient and necessary optimality conditions of two baseline scheduling strategies that correspond to emptying the queues using one-at-a-time or all-at-once strategies; and 3) presenting and proving the tractability of the special case in which the transmission rates are functions only of the cardinality of the link activation sets. These results are independent of physical-layer system specifications and are valid for any form of rate function. We then develop an algorithmic framework for the solution to this problem. The framework encompasses exact as well as sub-optimal, but fast, scheduling algorithms, all under a unified principle design. Through computational experiments, we finally investigate the performance of several specific algorithms from this framework.

The MESH-WISE project is aiming to address key fundamental issues in wireless mesh networking that span from fundamental performance characterization to prototyping heterogeneous-access mesh networking solutions for emergency response scenarios. In this paper we present the infrastructures that will be leveraged in this project and the latest results that have been acquired from the ones that are deployed. We further discuss the state of the art in academic and industrial resource and network management platforms and discuss how we will use existing know-how towards a centralized solution.

A distributed, load-aware, joint power and frequency allocation protocol is introduced for LTE-based cellular networks, and system-level simulations are performed. Our proposed scheme aims to cooperatively limit the impact of Fractional Frequency Reuse (FFR) on the center users' throughput compared to the Reuse 1 scheme, while providing sufficient throughput for the edge users. This is achieved through an asynchronous, lightweight scheme of local message exchange between neighboring LTE eNodeBs. The proposed scheme facilitates a type of “bargain” where an overloaded sector requests permission to utilize its neighbors' edge bands for its center users at a limited set of transmit power levels. Grants are generated at each neighbor by solving a small-scale optimization problem. Using an LTE simulator we evaluate our scheme on a network with 21 sectors of varying load patterns. The proposed scheme's performance for center users is consistently improved with respect to FFR-3, while for edge users the performance degradation is controlled by a parameter we set in the optimization problems' definitions; compared to Reuse 1 edge users still have gains. Specifically, we observed up to a 46% gain in the sectors' center throughput with a cost below 9% at the edges when compared to the classic FFR scheme, while the overall system throughput goes up by up to 26% in heavily loaded scenarios.

We consider N transmitter-receiver pairs that share a wireless channel and we address the problem of obtaining a schedule for activating subsets of these links so as to empty the transmitter queues in minimum time. Our aim is to provide theoretical insights for the optimality characterization of the problem, using both a cross-layer model formulation, which takes into account the effect of interference on achievable transmission rates, as well as a collision-based model, which does not incorporate the physical layer realities into the problem. We present the basic linear programming formulation of the problem and establish that the optimal schedule need not consist of more than N subset activation frames. We then prove that the problem is NP-hard for all reasonable continuous rate functions. Finally, we obtain sufficient and/or necessary conditions for optimality in a number of special cases.

A new fully decentralized dynamic fractional frequency reuse (FFR)-based scheme for cellular OFDMA networks is introduced. FFR is a technique to mitigate inter-cell interference to improve the throughput of interference-limited users on the cell edge, to the expense of the rest of the cell's users and the aggregate throughput. The proposed scheme aims to limit the FFR-incurred loss of the center users' throughput, while still providing sufficient bandwidth for the cell edge users' communication. This is done by local information sharing and distributed optimization. The resulting flexibility of frequency reuse can be especially beneficial in scenarios with non-uniform and time-varying load. The optimization task is accomplished by solving a knapsack problem in each cell, where the goal is to maximize the center throughput while maintaining acceptable degradation on the cell edge with respect to the original FFR allocation. The performance improvement resulting from the distributed and dynamic FFR scheme is demonstrated by snapshot simulations on an 81-cells network with asymmetric cell load. The proposed scheme achieves up to a 62% gain in cell-center throughput with a cost of no more than 18% at the edges when compared to the classic FFR scheme. The overall system throughput improvement ranges from 22% to 58%.

We present our initial work on the design and of an opportunistic forwarding scheme for a wireless network. The main focus in our work is to take advantage of the interplay of the lower layer parameters and thus decide the design aspects of the forwarding decisions for an adaptive probabilistic opportunistic forwarding scheme. We have already shown that our opportunistic scheme can outperform single path routing for moderate channel error values, we have also identified a tradeoff between differentiating the forwarder's back-off value to avoid collisions and reducing delay.

In this paper we consider the signal to interference plus noise ratio (SINR) criterion for connectivity, as a basis for a wireless ad hoc network and present a detailed study for the power performance of such a network. For this, we examine how typical wireless network parameters such as, network density and environment variables such as the path loss exponent can affect the power assigned to the transmitters and the resulting connectivity between specified nodes. We also present structural properties for the minimum power assignment. We finally examine at what cost malicious jamming nodes can harm the robustness of the network and asses whether the network can mitigate these jamming attempts by only adapting its transmission powers