Sameh Sorour

On Minimizing Broadcast Completion Delay for Instantly Decodable Network Coding

In this paper, we consider the problem of minimizing the mean completion delay in wireless broadcast for instantly decodable network coding. We first formulate the problem as a stochastic shortest path (SSP) problem. Although finding the packet selection policy using SSP is intractable, we use this formulation to draw the theoretical properties of efficient selection algorithms. Based on these properties, we propose a simple online selection algorithm that efficiently minimizes the mean completion delay of a frame of broadcast packets, compared to the random and greedy selection algorithms with a similar computational complexity. Simulation results show that our proposed algorithm indeed outperforms these random and greedy selection algorithms.

Indoor Tracking and Navigation Using Received Signal Strength and Compressive Sensing on a Mobile Device

An indoor tracking and navigation system based on measurements of received signal strength (RSS) in wireless local area network (WLAN) is proposed. In the system, the location determination problem is solved by first applying a proximity constraint to limit the distance between a coarse estimate of the current position and a previous estimate. Then, a Compressive Sensing-based (CS--based) positioning scheme, proposed in our previous work , , is applied to obtain a refined position estimate. The refined estimate is used with a map-adaptive Kalman filter, which assumes a linear motion between intersections on a map that describes the users path, to obtain a more robust position estimate. Experimental results with the system that is implemented on a PDA with limited resources (HP iPAQ hx2750 PDA) show that the proposed tracking system outperforms the widely used traditional positioning and tracking systems. Meanwhile, the tracking system leads to 12.6 percent reduction in the mean position error compared to the CS-based stationary positioning system when three APs are used. A navigation module that is integrated with the tracking system provides users with instructions to guide them to predefined destinations. Thirty visually impaired subjects from the Canadian National Institute for the Blind (CNIB) were invited to further evaluate the performance of the navigation system. Testing results suggest that the proposed system can be used to guide visually impaired subjects to their desired destinations.

Minimum Broadcast Decoding Delay for Generalized Instantly Decodable Network Coding

In this paper, we introduce the concept of generalized instantly decodable network coding (G- IDNC) to further minimize decoding delay in wireless broadcast, compared to strict instantly decodable network coding (S-IDNC), studied in [1], [2]. G-IDNC loosens the strict instant decodability constraint in order to target more receivers while preserving the attractive properties of S-IDNC. We show that the minimum decoding delay problem for G-IDNC can be formulated as a maximum weight clique problem over a well structured graph. Since finding the maximum weight clique of a graph is NP-hard, we design a simple heuristic G-IDNC algorithm with sub-optimal performance. However, simulation results show that both proposed optimal and heuristic G-IDNC algorithms considerably outperform several other S- IDNC and G-IDNC optimal and heuristic approaches.

Completion delay minimization for instantly decodable network codes

In this paper, we consider the problem of minimizing the completion delay for instantly decodable network coding (IDNC) in wireless multicast and broadcast scenarios. We are interested in this class of network coding due to its numerous benefits, such as low decoding delay, low coding and decoding complexities, and simple receiver requirements. We first extend the IDNC graph, which represents all feasible IDNC coding opportunities, to efficiently operate in both multicast and broadcast scenarios. We then formulate the minimum completion delay problem for IDNC as a stochastic shortest path (SSP) problem. Although finding the optimal policy using SSP is intractable, we use this formulation to draw the theoretical guidelines for the policies that can minimize the completion delay in IDNC. Based on these guidelines, we design a maximum weight clique selection algorithm, which can efficiently reduce the IDNC completion delay in polynomial time. We also design a quadratic-time heuristic clique selection algorithm, which can operate in real-time applications. Simulation results show that our proposed algorithms significantly reduce the IDNC completion delay compared to the random and maximum-rate algorithms, and almost achieve the global optimal completion delay performance over all network codes in broadcast scenarios.

Instantly decodable network coding for real-time device-to-device communications

This paper studies the delay reduction problem for instantly decodable network coding (IDNC)-based device-to-device (D2D) communication-enabled networks. Unlike conventional point-to-multipoint (PMP) systems in which the wireless base station has the sufficient computation abilities, D2D networks rely on battery-powered operations of the devices. Therefore, a particular emphasis on the computation complexity needs to be addressed in the design of delay reduction algorithms for D2D networks. While most of the existing literature on IDNC directly extend the delay reduction PMP schemes, known to be NP-hard, to the D2D setting, this paper proposes to investigate and minimize the complexity of such algorithms for battery-powered devices. With delay minimization problems in IDNC-based systems being equivalent to a maximum weight clique problems in the IDNC graph, the presented algorithms, in this paper, can be applied to different delay aspects. This paper introduces and focuses on the reduction of the maximum value of the decoding delay as it represents the most general solution. The complexity of the solution is reduced by first proposing efficient methods for the construction, the update, and the dimension reduction of the IDNC graph. The paper, further, shows that, under particular scenarios, the problem boils down to a maximum clique problem. Due to the complexity of discovering such maximum clique, the paper presents a fast selection algorithm. Simulation results illustrate the performance of the proposed schemes and suggest that the proposed fast selection algorithm provides appreciable complexity gain as compared to the optimal selection one, with a negligible degradation in performance. In addition, they indicate that the running time of the proposed solution is close to the random selection algorithm.

Joint Indoor Localization and Radio Map Construction with Limited Deployment Load

One major bottleneck in the practical implementation of received signal strength (RSS) based indoor localization systems is the extensive deployment efforts required to construct the radio maps through fingerprinting. In this paper, we aim to design an indoor localization scheme that can be directly employed without building a full fingerprinted radio map of the indoor environment. By accumulating the information of localized RSSs, this scheme can also simultaneously construct the radio map with limited calibration. To design this scheme, we employ a source data set that possesses the same spatial correlation of the RSSs in the indoor environment of interest. The knowledge of this data set is then transferred to a limited number of calibration fingerprints and one or several RSS observations with unknown locations, in order to perform direct localization of these observations using manifold alignment. We test two different source data sets, namely a simulated radio propagation map and the environments plan coordinates. For moving users, we exploit the correlation of their observations to improve their localization accuracy. The online testing in two indoor environments shows that the plan coordinates achieve better results than the simulated radio maps, and a negligible degradation with 70-85 percent reduction in the calibration load.

Optimum Network Coding for Delay Sensitive Applications in WiMAX Unicast

MAC layer random network coding (MRNC) was proposed in (1) as an alternative to HARQ for reliable data transmission in WiMAX unicast. It has been shown that MRNC achieves a higher transmission efficiency than HARQ as it avoids the problem of ACK/NAK packet overhead and the additional re- dundancy resulting from their loss. However, (1) did not address the problem of restricting the number of transmissions to an upper bound which is important for delay sensitive applications. In this paper, we investigate a more structured MAC layer coding scheme that achieves the optimum performance in the delay sensitive traffic context while achieving the same overhead level as MRNC. We first formulate the delay sensitive traffic satisfaction, in such an environment, as a minimax optimization problem over all possible coding schemes. We then show that the MAC layer Systematic Network Coding (MSNC), which transmits the packets once uncoded and employs random network coding for retransmissions, achieves the optimum performance for delay sensitive applications while achieving the same overhead level as MRNC. Index Terms—WiMAX, MAC Layer Random Network Coding, Delay Sensitive Applications.

Completion Delay Minimization for Instantly Decodable Network Coding with Limited Feedback

In this paper, we consider the problem of minimizing the broadcast completion delay for instantly decodable network coding with limited feedback. We first extend the stochastic shortest path formulation of the full feedback scenario in [1] to the limited feedback scenario. We then show that the resulting formulation is more complicated to solve than the original one but has its same properties and structure. Based on this result, we design four variants of the algorithm employed in [1] with four different approaches to deal with un-acknowledged transmissions. We finally compare these four algorithms through extensive simulations and show that the algorithm that temporarily avoids all un-acknowledged transmissions in subsequent coding decisions can result in tolerable degradation against the full feedback performance while using much lower feedback.

Enabling a Tradeoff between Completion Time and Decoding Delay in Instantly Decodable Network Coded Systems

This paper studies the complicated interplay of the completion time (as a measure of throughput) and the decoding delay performance in instantly decodable network coded (IDNC) systems over wireless broadcast erasure channels with memory. We propose two new algorithms that enable a tradeoff for an improved balance between completion time and decoding delay of broadcasting a block of packets. We first formulate the IDNC packet selection problem that improves the balance between completion time and decoding delay as a statistical shortest path (SSP) problem. However, since finding such packet selection policy using the SSP technique is computationally complex, we employ its geometric structure to find some guidelines and use them to propose two efficient heuristic packet selection algorithms for broadcast erasure channels with a wide range of memory conditions. It is shown that each one of the two proposed algorithms is superior for a specific range of memory conditions. Furthermore, we show that the proposed algorithms achieve an improved fairness in terms of the decoding delay across all receivers.

An adaptive network coded retransmission scheme for single-hop wireless multicast broadcast services

Network coding has recently attracted attention as a substantial improvement to packet retransmission schemes in wireless multicast broadcast services (MBS). Since the problem of finding the optimal network code maximizing the bandwidth efficiency is hard to solve and hard to approximate, two main network coding heuristic schemes, namely opportunistic and full network coding, were suggested in the literature to improve the MBS bandwidth efficiency. However, each of these two schemes usually outperforms the other in different receiver, demand, and feedback settings. The continuous and rapid change of these settings in wireless networks limits the bandwidth efficiency gains if only one scheme is always employed. In this paper, we propose an adaptive scheme that maintains the highest bandwidth efficiency obtainable by both opportunistic and full network coding schemes in wireless MBS. The proposed scheme adaptively selects, between these two schemes, the one that is expected to achieve the better bandwidth efficiency performance. The core contribution in this adaptive selection scheme lies in our derivation of performance metrics for opportunistic network coding, using random graph theory, which achieves efficient selection when compared to appropriate full network coding parameters. To compare between different complexity levels, we present three approaches to compute the performance metric for opportunistic coding using different levels of knowledge about the opportunistic coding graph. For the three considered approaches, simulation results show that our proposed scheme almost achieves the bandwidth efficiency performance that could be obtained by the optimal selection between the opportunistic and full coding schemes.