Elastic calls in an integrated services network: the greater the call size variability the better the QoS

We study a telecommunications network integrating prioritized stream calls and delay tolerant elastic calls that are served with the remaining (varying) service capacity according to a processor sharing discipline. The remarkable observation is presented and analytically supported that the expected elastic call holding time is decreasing in the variability of the elastic call size distribution. As a consequence, network planning guidelines or admission control schemes that are developed based on deterministic or lightly variable elastic call sizes are likely to be conservative and inefficient, given the commonly acknowledged property of e.g.\ \textsc{www}\ documents to be heavy tailed. Application areas of the model and results include fixed \textsc{ip} or \textsc{atm} networks and mobile cellular \textsc{gsm}/\textsc{gprs} and \textsc{umts} networks. \u

Receding Horizon Temporal Logic Control for Finite Deterministic Systems

This paper considers receding horizon control of finite deterministic systems, which must satisfy a high level, rich specification expressed as a linear temporal logic formula. Under the assumption that time-varying rewards are associated with states of the system and they can be observed in real-time, the control objective is to maximize the collected reward while satisfying the high level task specification. In order to properly react to the changing rewards, a controller synthesis framework inspired by model predictive control is proposed, where the rewards are locally optimized at each time-step over a finite horizon, and the immediate optimal control is applied. By enforcing appropriate constraints, the infinite trajectory produced by the controller is guaranteed to satisfy the desired temporal logic formula. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the approach.Comment: Technical report accompanying a paper to be presented at ACC 201

Reactive Planning for Mobile Manipulation Tasks in Unexplored Semantic Environments

Complex manipulation tasks, such as rearrangement planning of numerous objects, are combinatorially hard problems. Existing algorithms either do not scale well or assume a great deal of prior knowledge about the environment, and few offer any rigorous guarantees. In this paper, we propose a novel hybrid control architecture for achieving such tasks with mobile manipulators. On the discrete side, we enrich a temporal logic specification with mobile manipulation primitives such as moving to a point, and grasping or moving an object. Such specifications are translated to an automaton representation, which orchestrates the physical grounding of the task to mobility or manipulation controllers. The grounding from the discrete to the continuous reactive controller is online and can respond to the discovery of unknown obstacles or decide to push out of the way movable objects that prohibit task accomplishment. Despite the problem complexity, we prove that, under specific conditions, our architecture enjoys provable completeness on the discrete side, provable termination on the continuous side, and avoids all obstacles in the environment. Simulations illustrate the efficiency of our architecture that can handle tasks of increased complexity while also responding to unknown obstacles or unanticipated adverse configurations. For more information: Kod*la