7,208 research outputs found
Network Utility Maximization under Maximum Delay Constraints and Throughput Requirements
We consider the problem of maximizing aggregate user utilities over a
multi-hop network, subject to link capacity constraints, maximum end-to-end
delay constraints, and user throughput requirements. A user's utility is a
concave function of the achieved throughput or the experienced maximum delay.
The problem is important for supporting real-time multimedia traffic, and is
uniquely challenging due to the need of simultaneously considering maximum
delay constraints and throughput requirements. We first show that it is
NP-complete either (i) to construct a feasible solution strictly meeting all
constraints, or (ii) to obtain an optimal solution after we relax maximum delay
constraints or throughput requirements up to constant ratios. We then develop a
polynomial-time approximation algorithm named PASS. The design of PASS
leverages a novel understanding between non-convex maximum-delay-aware problems
and their convex average-delay-aware counterparts, which can be of independent
interest and suggest a new avenue for solving maximum-delay-aware network
optimization problems. Under realistic conditions, PASS achieves constant or
problem-dependent approximation ratios, at the cost of violating maximum delay
constraints or throughput requirements by up to constant or problem-dependent
ratios. PASS is practically useful since the conditions for PASS are satisfied
in many popular application scenarios. We empirically evaluate PASS using
extensive simulations of supporting video-conferencing traffic across Amazon
EC2 datacenters. Compared to existing algorithms and a conceivable baseline,
PASS obtains up to improvement of utilities, by meeting the throughput
requirements but relaxing the maximum delay constraints that are acceptable for
practical video conferencing applications
Reverse Engineering TCP/IP-like Networks using Delay-Sensitive Utility Functions
TCP/IP can be interpreted as a distributed primal-dual algorithm to maximize aggregate utility over source rates. It has recently been shown that an equilibrium of TCP/IP, if it exists, maximizes the same delay-insensitive utility over both source rates and routes, provided pure congestion prices are used as link costs in the shortest-path calculation of IP. In practice, however, pure dynamic routing is never used and link costs are weighted sums of both static as well as dynamic components. In this paper, we introduce delay-sensitive utility functions and identify a class of utility functions that such a TCP/IP equilibrium optimizes. We exhibit some counter-intuitive properties that any class of delay-sensitive utility functions optimized by TCP/IP necessarily possess. We prove a sufficient condition for global stability of routing updates for general networks. We construct example networks that defy conventional wisdom on the effect of link cost parameters on network stability and utility
The role of asymptotic functions in network optimization and feasibility studies
Solutions to network optimization problems have greatly benefited from
developments in nonlinear analysis, and, in particular, from developments in
convex optimization. A key concept that has made convex and nonconvex analysis
an important tool in science and engineering is the notion of asymptotic
function, which is often hidden in many influential studies on nonlinear
analysis and related fields. Therefore, we can also expect that asymptotic
functions are deeply connected to many results in the wireless domain, even
though they are rarely mentioned in the wireless literature. In this study, we
show connections of this type. By doing so, we explain many properties of
centralized and distributed solutions to wireless resource allocation problems
within a unified framework, and we also generalize and unify existing
approaches to feasibility analysis of network designs. In particular, we show
sufficient and necessary conditions for mappings widely used in wireless
communication problems (more precisely, the class of standard interference
mappings) to have a fixed point. Furthermore, we derive fundamental bounds on
the utility and the energy efficiency that can be achieved by solving a large
family of max-min utility optimization problems in wireless networks.Comment: GlobalSIP 2017 (to appear
Utility Optimal Scheduling and Admission Control for Adaptive Video Streaming in Small Cell Networks
We consider the jointly optimal design of a transmission scheduling and
admission control policy for adaptive video streaming over small cell networks.
We formulate the problem as a dynamic network utility maximization and observe
that it naturally decomposes into two subproblems: admission control and
transmission scheduling. The resulting algorithms are simple and suitable for
distributed implementation. The admission control decisions involve each user
choosing the quality of the video chunk asked for download, based on the
network congestion in its neighborhood. This form of admission control is
compatible with the current video streaming technology based on the DASH
protocol over TCP connections. Through simulations, we evaluate the performance
of the proposed algorithm under realistic assumptions for a small-cell network.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figures. Accepted and will be presented at IEEE
International Symposium on Information Theory (ISIT) 201
Counter-intuitive throughput behaviors in networks under end-to-end control
It has been shown that as long as traffic sources adapt their rates to aggregate congestion measure in their paths, they implicitly maximize certain utility. In this paper we study some counter-intuitive throughput behaviors in such networks, pertaining to whether a fair allocation is always inefficient and whether increasing capacity always raises aggregate throughput. A bandwidth allocation policy can be defined in terms of a class of utility functions parameterized by a scalar a that can be interpreted as a quantitative measure of fairness. An allocation is fair if alpha is large and efficient if aggregate throughput is large. All examples in the literature suggest that a fair allocation is necessarily inefficient. We characterize exactly the tradeoff between fairness and throughput in general networks. The characterization allows us both to produce the first counter-example and trivially explain all the previous supporting examples. Surprisingly, our counter-example has the property that a fairer allocation is always more efficient. In particular it implies that maxmin fairness can achieve a higher throughput than proportional fairness. Intuitively, we might expect that increasing link capacities always raises aggregate throughput. We show that not only can throughput be reduced when some link increases its capacity, more strikingly, it can also be reduced when all links increase their capacities by the same amount. If all links increase their capacities proportionally, however, throughput will indeed increase. These examples demonstrate the intricate interactions among sources in a network setting that are missing in a single-link topology
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