On a class of covering problems with variable capacities in wireless networks

We consider the problem of allocating clients to base stations in wireless networks. Two design decisions are the location of the base stations, and the power levels of the base stations. We model the interference, due to the increased power usage resulting in greater serving radius, as capacities that are non-increasing with respect to the covering radius. Clients have demands that are not necessarily uniform and the capacity of a facility limits the total demand that can be served by the facility. We consider three models. In the first model, the location of the base stations and the clients are fixed, and the problem is to determine the serving radius for each base station so as to serve a set of clients with maximum total profit subject to the capacity constraints of the base stations. In the second model, each client has an associated demand in addition to its profit. A fixed number of facilities have to be opened from a candidate set of locations. The goal is to serve clients so as to maximize the profit subject to the capacity constraints. In the third model, the location and the serving radius of the base stations are to be determined. There are costs associated with opening the base stations, and the goal is to open a set of base stations of minimum total cost so as to serve the entire demand subject to the capacity constraints at the base stations. We show that for the first model the problem is NP-complete even when there are only two choices for the serving radius, and the capacities are 1, 2. For the second model, we give a 1/2 approximation algorithm. For the third model, we give a column generation procedure for solving the standard linear programming model, and a randomized rounding procedure. We establish the efficacy of the column generation based rounding scheme on randomly generated instances

Joint Service Placement and Request Routing in Multi-cell Mobile Edge Computing Networks

The proliferation of innovative mobile services such as augmented reality, networked gaming, and autonomous driving has spurred a growing need for low-latency access to computing resources that cannot be met solely by existing centralized cloud systems. Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) is expected to be an effective solution to meet the demand for low-latency services by enabling the execution of computing tasks at the network-periphery, in proximity to end-users. While a number of recent studies have addressed the problem of determining the execution of service tasks and the routing of user requests to corresponding edge servers, the focus has primarily been on the efficient utilization of computing resources, neglecting the fact that non-trivial amounts of data need to be stored to enable service execution, and that many emerging services exhibit asymmetric bandwidth requirements. To fill this gap, we study the joint optimization of service placement and request routing in MEC-enabled multi-cell networks with multidimensional (storage-computation-communication) constraints. We show that this problem generalizes several problems in literature and propose an algorithm that achieves close-to-optimal performance using randomized rounding. Evaluation results demonstrate that our approach can effectively utilize the available resources to maximize the number of requests served by low-latency edge cloud servers.Comment: IEEE Infocom 201

Content Distribution by Multiple Multicast Trees and Intersession Cooperation: Optimal Algorithms and Approximations

In traditional massive content distribution with multiple sessions, the sessions form separate overlay networks and operate independently, where some sessions may suffer from insufficient resources even though other sessions have excessive resources. To cope with this problem, we consider the universal swarming approach, which allows multiple sessions to cooperate with each other. We formulate the problem of finding the optimal resource allocation to maximize the sum of the session utilities and present a subgradient algorithm which converges to the optimal solution in the time-average sense. The solution involves an NP-hard subproblem of finding a minimum-cost Steiner tree. We cope with this difficulty by using a column generation method, which reduces the number of Steiner-tree computations. Furthermore, we allow the use of approximate solutions to the Steiner-tree subproblem. We show that the approximation ratio to the overall problem turns out to be no less than the reciprocal of the approximation ratio to the Steiner-tree subproblem. Simulation results demonstrate that universal swarming improves the performance of resource-poor sessions with negligible impact to resource-rich sessions. The proposed approach and algorithm are expected to be useful for infrastructure-based content distribution networks with long-lasting sessions and relatively stable network environment