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Multicasting does not work well for video applications such as video on demand, where individual users request video content at discrete and unpredictable moments. In this paper, we study a concurrent video multicast orchestration solution for the caching-assisted and centrally controlled mobile networks. The proposed solution strives to obtain rapid video prefetch and effective traffic reduction. By rapid video prefetch, user devices can cache required contents in advance, which can effectively improve the streaming fluency in unsteady wireless environments, especially the highly mobile vehicular environment. We introduce a maximum-rate concurrent multicast (MRCM) problem whose solution is intended to maximize the total video delivery rate by a concurrent multicast manner, and prove that the MRCM problem is NP-hard. Then, we propose a dynamic concurrent multicast tree construction algorithm and a global concurrent multicast tree optimization algorithm to approximately solve the MRCM problem in polynomial time. We also introduce a cache competition mechanism that strives to maximize the total cache hit rate when the cache space is insufficient. Performance evaluations show that compared with the existing cache-assisted multicast delivery solutions, the proposed solution significantly reduces the video delivery duration and the traffic stress of backhaul links. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Network Function Virtualization (NFV)-based 5G networks deliver specific services to a end-users through the creation of Service Function Chains (SFCs), which are composed of a number of Virtualized Network Functions (VNFs) interconnected via a set of virtual links (vLinks). VNFs consume computational resources of the network's servers, while vLinks utilize the communicational resources of the network. The efficient utilization of network resources remains a challenge in NFV-based networks. To this end, in this paper, we propose an analytical framework for the Admission Ratio (AR) calculation in NFV-based converged optical-wireless 5G networks. The proposed methodology employs a network slicing architecture in which different network slices form end-to-end logically isolated networks and each slice delivers a specific service type to the users through its SFC(s). In the proposed analysis, we not only take into account the occupancy distribution in both the network's computational and communicational domains (servers and fiber links), but we also consider the SFC establishment AR by taking into account different sub-service-classes belonging to different slices. The accuracy of the model is evaluated through the comparison of analytical and simulation results and was found satisfactory. Furthermore, the proposed model is employed for the determination of the optimal (minimum) capacity for all SFCs elements (VNFs and vLinks), in a way that users belonging to a specific slice experience a predefined value of AR as minimum. Additionally, our calculations deploy recursive formulas, which have a low computational complexity, as opposed to time-consuming simulations, without requiring the application of complex optimization algorithms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Due to the inherent openness of wireless channels, data transmission in user-centric ultra-dense networks (UUDNs) is vulnerable to eavesdropping and malicious jamming attacks (EJA). This paper addresses the user-centric clustering, beamforming, and artificial noise design to combat with the EJA, and an accelerated deep reinforcement learning (DRL) based approach has been proposed for the downlink of UUDNs from a security, reliability and energy efficiency (SREE) perspective. In contrast to the existing approaches, the proposed approach divides the UE's communication behavior into association phase and transmission phase to perform a fast and adaptive response to the EJA. For the association phase, the proposed approach aims at achieving a fast response to EJA by optimization algorithms from a short-term perspective. For the transmission phase, we propose a DRL based algorithm to achieve optimal adaptive response by dealing with the dynamic and persistent effects of EJA from a long-term perspective. To accelerate the training process, fast response achieved in the association phase will be regarded as the initial experience to update the parameters of the deep neural networks adopted by the DRL based algorithm for transmission phase. Comparing with the existing methods, simulation results show that our proposed accelerated DRL approach achieves better performance in terms of SREE and convergence speed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The energy detection technology is recommended in the licensed assisted access (LAA) scheme by 3GPP because of its simplicity and low cost. However, due to its inherent limitation, there may exist imperfect channel detection, which can lead to the decrease of the channel utilization efficiency and the deterioration of fairness. The imperfect detection can generally be represented by the detection probability and false alarm probability, which depend on detection time, signal to noise ration (SNR), sampling rate and energy threshold. However, among the parameters, only the energy threshold can be dominated by LAA small base stations (SBSs) in the LAA scheme. Therefore, the energy threshold should be dynamically adjusted in the changeable channel environment such that the detection accuracy can improved as high as possible. Consider the fact that the optimization theory cannot be used to optimize the energy threshold since the expressions of performance indexes about the energy threshold are extremely complex, a Q-learning based energy threshold optimization algorithm (QLET) is thus proposed in the paper, where LAA SBSs act as the agent, the energy threshold is defined as the agent action, the different combinations of fairness and throughput are defined as the agent states, and the fairness and the reward function are also redefined. In order to ensure the smooth implementation of the proposed QLET algorithm, the information exchange mechanism, where the sending-confirmation mechanism and 1- persistent CSMA are used, is also proposed. Based on the proposed QL framework, the agent can learn the optimal energy threshold by repeatedly interacting with the environment, which enables the coexistence system to obtain the best coexistence performance. A large number of simulation results show that the proposed QLET is superior to the traditional fixed energy threshold scheme (FET) in terms of the fairness, WiFi collision probability and transmission delay, and that QLET is almost the same as FET in term of throughput. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]