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 $100\%$ improvement of utilities, by meeting the throughput requirements but relaxing the maximum delay constraints that are acceptable for practical video conferencing applications

On the Min-Max-Delay Problem: NP-completeness, Algorithm, and Integrality Gap

We study a delay-sensitive information flow problem where a source streams information to a sink over a directed graph G(V,E) at a fixed rate R possibly using multiple paths to minimize the maximum end-to-end delay, denoted as the Min-Max-Delay problem. Transmission over an edge incurs a constant delay within the capacity. We prove that Min-Max-Delay is weakly NP-complete, and demonstrate that it becomes strongly NP-complete if we require integer flow solution. We propose an optimal pseudo-polynomial time algorithm for Min-Max-Delay, with time complexity O(\log (Nd_{\max}) (N^5d_{\max}^{2.5})(\log R+N^2d_{\max}\log(N^2d_{\max}))), where N = \max\{|V|,|E|\} and d_{\max} is the maximum edge delay. Besides, we show that the integrality gap, which is defined as the ratio of the maximum delay of an optimal integer flow to the maximum delay of an optimal fractional flow, could be arbitrarily large

Minimizing Age-of-Information with Throughput Requirements in Multi-Path Network Communication

We consider the scenario where a sender periodically sends a batch of data to a receiver over a multi-hop network, possibly using multiple paths. Our objective is to minimize peak/average Age-of-Information (AoI) subject to throughput requirements. The consideration of batch generation and multi-path communication differentiates our AoI study from existing ones. We first show that our AoI minimization problems are NP-hard, but only in the weak sense, as we develop an optimal algorithm with a pseudo-polynomial time complexity. We then prove that minimizing AoI and minimizing maximum delay are "roughly" equivalent, in the sense that any optimal solution of the latter is an approximate solution of the former with bounded optimality loss. We leverage this understanding to design a general approximation framework for our problems. It can build upon any $\alpha$-approximation algorithm of the maximum delay minimization problem, to construct an $(\alpha+c)$-approximate solution for minimizing AoI. Here $c$ is a constant depending on the throughput requirements. Simulations over various network topologies validate the effectiveness of our approach.Comment: Accepted by the ACM Twentieth International Symposium on Mobile Ad Hoc Networking and Computing (ACM MobiHoc 2019

Sandpile Prediction on Structured Undirected Graphs

We present algorithms that compute the terminal configurations for sandpile instances in $O(n \log n)$ time on trees and $O(n)$ time on paths, where $n$ is the number of vertices. The Abelian Sandpile model is a well-known model used in exploring self-organized criticality. Despite a large amount of work on other aspects of sandpiles, there have been limited results in efficiently computing the terminal state, known as the sandpile prediction problem. Our algorithm improves the previous best runtime of $O(n \log^5 n)$ on trees [Ramachandran-Schild SODA '17] and $O(n \log n)$ on paths [Moore-Nilsson '99]. To do so, we move beyond the simulation of individual events by directly computing the number of firings for each vertex. The computation is accelerated using splittable binary search trees. We also generalize our algorithm to adapt at most three sink vertices, which is the first prediction algorithm faster than mere simulation on a sandpile model with sinks. We provide a general reduction that transforms the prediction problem on an arbitrary graph into problems on its subgraphs separated by any vertex set $P$. The reduction gives a time complexity of $O(\log^{|P|} n \cdot T)$ where $T$ denotes the total time for solving on each subgraph. In addition, we give algorithms in $O(n)$ time on cliques and $O(n \log^2 n)$ time on pseudotrees.Comment: 66 pages, submitted to SODA2