In-Network Processing For Mission-Criticalwireless Networked Sensing And Control: A Real-Time, Efficiency, And Resiliency Perspective

As wireless cyber-physical systems (WCPS) are increasingly being deployed in mission-critical applications, it becomes imperative that we consider application QoS requirements in in-network processing (INP). In this dissertation, we explore the potentials of two INP methods, packet packing and network coding, on improving network performance while satisfying application QoS requirements. We find that not only can these two techniques increase the energy efficiency, reliability, and throughput of WCPS while satisfying QoS requirements of applications in a relatively static environment, but also they can provide low cost proactive protection against transient node failures in a more dynamic wireless environment. We first study the problem of jointly optimizing packet packing and the timeliness of data delivery. We identify the conditions under which the problem is strong NP-hard, and we find that the problem complexity heavily depends on aggregation constraints instead of network and traffic properties. For cases when the problem is NP-hard, we show that there is no polynomial-time approximation scheme (PTAS); for cases when the problem can be solved in polynomial time, we design polynomial time, offline algorithms for finding the optimal packet packing schemes. We design a distributed, online protocol tPack that schedules packet transmissions to maximize the local utility of packet packing at each node. We evaluate the properties of tPack in NetEye testbed. We find that jointly optimizing data delivery timeliness and packet packing and considering real-world aggregation constraints significantly improve network performance. We then work on the problem of minimizing the transmission cost of network coding based routing in sensor networks. We propose the first mathematical framework so far as we know on how to theoretically compute the expected transmission cost of NC-based routing in terms of expected number of transmission. Based on this framework, we design a polynomial-time greedy algorithm for forwarder set selection and prove its optimality on transmission cost minimization. We designed EENCR, an energy-efficient NC-based routing protocol that implement our forwarder set selection algorithm to minimize the overall transmission cost. Through comparative study on EENCR and other state-of-the-art routing protocols, we show that EENCR significantly outperforms CTP, MORE and CodeOR in delivery reliability, delivery cost and network goodput. Furthermore, we study the 1+1 proactive protection problem using network coding. We show that even under a simplified setting, finding two node-disjoint routing braids with minimal total cost is NP-hard. We then design a heuristic algorithm to construct two node-disjoint braids with a transmission cost upper bounded by two shortest node-disjoint paths. And we design ProNCP, a proactive NC-based protection protocol using similar design philosophy as in EENCR. We evaluate the performance of ProNCP under various transient network failure scenarios. Experiment results show that ProNCP is resilient to various network failure scenarios and provides a state performance in terms of reliability, delivery cost and goodput. Our findings in this dissertation explore the challenges, benefits and solutions in designing real-time, efficient, resilient and QoS-guaranteed wireless cyber-physical systems, and our solutions shed lights for future research on related topics

Polygamy relations of multipartite systems

We investigate the polygamy relations of multipartite quantum states. General polygamy inequalities are given in the $\alpha$th $(\alpha\geq 2)$ power of concurrence of assistance, $\beta$th $(\beta \geq1)$ power of entanglement of assistance, and the squared convex-roof extended negativity of assistance (SCRENoA)

Implementing the Black-Litterman Model with Resampling: A Typical Investment Portfolio with Hedge Funds

Asset allocation decision is ranked as the most important investment decision an investor should make. Researchers have developed many optimization tools to find the best allocation for investors. Our paper will focus on implementing Black-Litterman model together with resampling techniques for portfolio allocations. In our paper, we are going to empirically test the usefulness of those techniques. The results from our research proved that Black-Litterman model and Resampling techniques are advanced methods, which help to generate better allocations than the traditional Markowitz method does. As focusing on typical Canadian investors, our reference portfolio is consisted of S&P TSX, S&P 500, DEX Universe Bond Index, T-Bills and various Canadian hedge funds indices. Using new data sets, we will test whether the results presented in Kooli and Selam’s 2010 paper will still hold. Lastly, further thoughts of our research will be discussed

Bearing Fault Diagnosis for Direct-Drive Wind Turbines via Current-Demodulated Signals

Bearing faults account for a large portion of all faults in wind turbine generators (WTGs). Current-based bearing fault diagnosis techniques have great economic benefits and are potential to be adopted by the wind energy industry. This paper models the modulation effects of bearing faults on the stator currents of a direct-drive wind turbine equipped with a permanent-magnet synchronous generator (PMSG) operating with a variable shaft rotating frequency. Based on the analysis, a method consisting of appropriate current frequency and amplitude demodulation algorithms and a 1P-invariant power spectrum density algorithm is proposed for bearing fault diagnosis of variable-speed direct-drive wind turbines using only one-phase stator current measurements, where 1P frequency stands for the shaft rotating frequency of a wind turbine. Experimental results on a direct-drive wind turbine equipped with a PMSG operating in a wind tunnel are provided to verify the proposed fault diagnosis method. The proposed method is demonstrated to have advantages over the method of directly using stator current measurements for WTG bearing fault diagnosis

Near-Optimal Differentially Private Reinforcement Learning

Motivated by personalized healthcare and other applications involving sensitive data, we study online exploration in reinforcement learning with differential privacy (DP) constraints. Existing work on this problem established that no-regret learning is possible under joint differential privacy (JDP) and local differential privacy (LDP) but did not provide an algorithm with optimal regret. We close this gap for the JDP case by designing an $\epsilon$-JDP algorithm with a regret of $\widetilde{O}(\sqrt{SAH^2T}+S^2AH^3/\epsilon)$ which matches the information-theoretic lower bound of non-private learning for all choices of $\epsilon> S^{1.5}A^{0.5} H^2/\sqrt{T}$. In the above, $S$, $A$ denote the number of states and actions, $H$ denotes the planning horizon, and $T$ is the number of steps. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first private RL algorithm that achieves \emph{privacy for free} asymptotically as $T\rightarrow \infty$. Our techniques -- which could be of independent interest -- include privately releasing Bernstein-type exploration bonuses and an improved method for releasing visitation statistics. The same techniques also imply a slightly improved regret bound for the LDP case.Comment: 38 page