15 research outputs found
Low Power Dynamic Scheduling for Computing Systems
This paper considers energy-aware control for a computing system with two
states: "active" and "idle." In the active state, the controller chooses to
perform a single task using one of multiple task processing modes. The
controller then saves energy by choosing an amount of time for the system to be
idle. These decisions affect processing time, energy expenditure, and an
abstract attribute vector that can be used to model other criteria of interest
(such as processing quality or distortion). The goal is to optimize time
average system performance. Applications of this model include a smart phone
that makes energy-efficient computation and transmission decisions, a computer
that processes tasks subject to rate, quality, and power constraints, and a
smart grid energy manager that allocates resources in reaction to a time
varying energy price. The solution methodology of this paper uses the theory of
optimization for renewal systems developed in our previous work. This paper is
written in tutorial form and develops the main concepts of the theory using
several detailed examples. It also highlights the relationship between online
dynamic optimization and linear fractional programming. Finally, it provides
exercises to help the reader learn the main concepts and apply them to their
own optimizations. This paper is an arxiv technical report, and is a
preliminary version of material that will appear as a book chapter in an
upcoming book on green communications and networking.Comment: 26 pages, 10 figures, single spac
Scheduling of Multicast and Unicast Services under Limited Feedback by using Rateless Codes
Many opportunistic scheduling techniques are impractical because they require
accurate channel state information (CSI) at the transmitter. In this paper, we
investigate the scheduling of unicast and multicast services in a downlink
network with a very limited amount of feedback information. Specifically,
unicast users send imperfect (or no) CSI and infrequent acknowledgements (ACKs)
to a base station, and multicast users only report infrequent ACKs to avoid
feedback implosion. We consider the use of physical-layer rateless codes, which
not only combats channel uncertainty, but also reduces the overhead of ACK
feedback. A joint scheduling and power allocation scheme is developed to
realize multiuser diversity gain for unicast service and multicast gain for
multicast service. We prove that our scheme achieves a near-optimal throughput
region. Our simulation results show that our scheme significantly improves the
network throughput over schemes employing fixed-rate codes or using only
unicast communications
Verification and control of partially observable probabilistic systems
We present automated techniques for the verification and control of partially observable, probabilistic systems for both discrete and dense models of time. For the discrete-time case, we formally model these systems using partially observable Markov decision processes; for dense time, we propose an extension of probabilistic timed automata in which local states are partially visible to an observer or controller. We give probabilistic temporal logics that can express a range of quantitative properties of these models, relating to the probability of an event’s occurrence or the expected value of a reward measure. We then propose techniques to either verify that such a property holds or synthesise a controller for the model which makes it true. Our approach is based on a grid-based abstraction of the uncountable belief space induced by partial observability and, for dense-time models, an integer discretisation of real-time behaviour. The former is necessarily approximate since the underlying problem is undecidable, however we show how both lower and upper bounds on numerical results can be generated. We illustrate the effectiveness of the approach by implementing it in the PRISM model checker and applying it to several case studies from the domains of task and network scheduling, computer security and planning