Control of Robotic Mobility-On-Demand Systems: a Queueing-Theoretical Perspective

In this paper we present and analyze a queueing-theoretical model for autonomous mobility-on-demand (MOD) systems where robotic, self-driving vehicles transport customers within an urban environment and rebalance themselves to ensure acceptable quality of service throughout the entire network. We cast an autonomous MOD system within a closed Jackson network model with passenger loss. It is shown that an optimal rebalancing algorithm minimizing the number of (autonomously) rebalancing vehicles and keeping vehicles availabilities balanced throughout the network can be found by solving a linear program. The theoretical insights are used to design a robust, real-time rebalancing algorithm, which is applied to a case study of New York City. The case study shows that the current taxi demand in Manhattan can be met with about 8,000 robotic vehicles (roughly 60% of the size of the current taxi fleet). Finally, we extend our queueing-theoretical setup to include congestion effects, and we study the impact of autonomously rebalancing vehicles on overall congestion. Collectively, this paper provides a rigorous approach to the problem of system-wide coordination of autonomously driving vehicles, and provides one of the first characterizations of the sustainability benefits of robotic transportation networks.Comment: 10 pages, To appear at RSS 201

Low-Latency Millimeter-Wave Communications: Traffic Dispersion or Network Densification?

This paper investigates two strategies to reduce the communication delay in future wireless networks: traffic dispersion and network densification. A hybrid scheme that combines these two strategies is also considered. The probabilistic delay and effective capacity are used to evaluate performance. For probabilistic delay, the violation probability of delay, i.e., the probability that the delay exceeds a given tolerance level, is characterized in terms of upper bounds, which are derived by applying stochastic network calculus theory. In addition, to characterize the maximum affordable arrival traffic for mmWave systems, the effective capacity, i.e., the service capability with a given quality-of-service (QoS) requirement, is studied. The derived bounds on the probabilistic delay and effective capacity are validated through simulations. These numerical results show that, for a given average system gain, traffic dispersion, network densification, and the hybrid scheme exhibit different potentials to reduce the end-to-end communication delay. For instance, traffic dispersion outperforms network densification, given high average system gain and arrival rate, while it could be the worst option, otherwise. Furthermore, it is revealed that, increasing the number of independent paths and/or relay density is always beneficial, while the performance gain is related to the arrival rate and average system gain, jointly. Therefore, a proper transmission scheme should be selected to optimize the delay performance, according to the given conditions on arrival traffic and system service capability

Analysis and Optimization of Cellular Network with Burst Traffic

In this paper, we analyze the performance of cellular networks and study the optimal base station (BS) density to reduce the network power consumption. In contrast to previous works with similar purpose, we consider Poisson traffic for users' traffic model. In such situation, each BS can be viewed as M/G/1 queuing model. Based on theory of stochastic geometry, we analyze users' signal-to-interference-plus-noise-ratio (SINR) and obtain the average transmission time of each packet. While most of the previous works on SINR analysis in academia considered full buffer traffic, our analysis provides a basic framework to estimate the performance of cellular networks with burst traffic. We find that the users' SINR depends on the average transmission probability of BSs, which is defined by a nonlinear equation. As it is difficult to obtain the closed-form solution, we solve this nonlinear equation by bisection method. Besides, we formulate the optimization problem to minimize the area power consumption. An iteration algorithm is proposed to derive the local optimal BS density, and the numerical result shows that the proposed algorithm can converge to the global optimal BS density. At the end, the impact of BS density on users' SINR and average packet delay will be discussed.Comment: This paper has been withdrawn by the author due to missuse of queue model in Section Fou