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Internet of Things (IoT) includes numerous sensing nodes that constitute a large scale-free network. Optimizing the network topology to increase resistance against malicious attacks is a complex problem, especially on 3-dimension (3D) topological deployment. Heuristic algorithms, particularly genetic algorithms, can effectively cope with such problems. However, conventional genetic algorithms are prone to falling into premature convergence owing to the lack of global search ability caused by the loss of population diversity during evolution. Although this can be alleviated by increasing population size, the additional computational overhead will be incurred. Moreover, after crossover and mutation operations, individual changes in the population are mixed, and loss of optimal individuals may occur, which will slow down the population’s evolution. Therefore, we combine the population state with the evolutionary process and propose an Adaptive Robustness Evolution Algorithm (AREA) with self-competition for scale-free IoT topologies. In AREA, the crossover and mutation operations are dynamically adjusted according to population diversity to ensure global search ability. A self-competitive mechanism is used to ensure convergence. We construct a 3D IoT topology that is optimized by AREA. The simulation results demonstrate that AREA is more effective in improving the robustness of scale-free IoT networks than several existing methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, a resource allocation problem is formulated to maximize the throughput of vehicular user equipments (VUEs) in both licensed, and unlicensed frequency bands under constraints of reliability, and latency for vehicular communications as well as the Quality of Service (QoS) for WiFi network based on a network system with coexisting VUEs, and WiFi user equipments (WUEs). In the system, the VUEs are able to access to the unlicensed frequency bands, and the interference among the VUEs, and WUEs are mitigated by the listen-before-talk (LBT) scheme or the duty cycle scheme. Due to the mixed integer nonlinear programming (MINLP) objective in the optimization problem, the problem is hard to be solved directly. Instead, we solve the problem by two steps. The number of VUEs offloaded to unlicensed frequency bands as well as the time factor for duty cycle scheme is firstly determined, and then, the optimization problem is converted into a convex optimization problem, which is solved by the proposed Lagrange Duality Method (LDM). Numerical results show the efficiency of our proposed application scenario compared to case with only LTE system or only WiFi system. Moreover, compared to traditional Greedy algorithm, the proposed algorithm performs better in terms of throughput with a guaranteed QoS of WUEs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As urban traffic condition is diverse and complicated, applying reinforcement learning to reduce traffic congestion becomes one of the hot and promising topics. Especially, how to coordinate the traffic light controllers of multiple intersections is a key challenge for multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL). Most existing MARL studies are based on traditional $Q$ -learning, but unstable environment leads to poor learning in the complicated and dynamic traffic scenarios. In this paper, we propose a novel multi-agent recurrent deep deterministic policy gradient (MARDDPG) algorithm based on deep deterministic policy gradient (DDPG) algorithm for traffic light control (TLC) in vehiclar networks. Specifically, the centralized learning in each critic network enables each agent to estimate the policies of other agents in the decision-making process and each agent can coordinate with each other, alleviating the problem of poor learning performance caused by environmental instability. The decentralized execution enables each agent to make decisions independently. We share parameters in actor networks to speed up the training process and reduce the memory footprint. The addition of LSTM is beneficial to alleviate the instability of the environment caused by partial observable state. We utilize surveillance cameras and vehicular networks to collect status information for each intersection. Unlike previous work, we have not only considered the vehicle but also considered the pedestrians waiting to pass through the intersection. Moreover, we also set different priorities for buses and ordinary vehicles. The experimental results in a vehicular network show that our method can run stably in various scenarios and coordinate multiple intersections, which significantly reduces vehicle congestion and pedestrian congestion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As video data are occupying an increasingly more significant portion of global data traffic, video communication has become an indispensable component for most multimedia applications. As an enabling technology of video communication, although video coding is well standardized, the strategy to control video codec is highly customized to applications. The consistency of video quality is being paid more attention in many emerging applications. For example, in video surveillance, the quality of video frames should be stable in order to ensure the performance of machine intelligence algorithm, such as object detection precision. In this paper, we focus on achieving constant objective reconstruction quality in the process of video coding. To achieve certain rate-distortion performance, bit rate and distortion metric are usually modeled as a function of video content and control parameters of codec. For content modeling in existing work, there is still room for improvement, including the design of more efficient content feature, the compensation for assumption about constant RD characteristics among consecutive frames, and the adjustment of Lagrangian multiplier $\lambda $ according to content property. The main contributions of this paper are: 1) a robust content adaptive model for residual bit rate modeling based on content statistics called mean absolute partial transformed difference (MAPTD); 2) a content-related header bit rate modeling; 3) preprocessing scheme for robust content feature estimation at scene change; 4) a distortion model consistent with local content; and 5) content adaptive $\lambda $ determination. The experimental results show that our constant quality control strategy can achieve superior performance compared with the state-of-the-art algorithms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To address the problem of segmenting an image into sizeable homogeneous regions, this paper proposes an efficient agglomerative algorithm on the basis of modularity optimization. Given an oversegmented image that consists of many small regions, our algorithm automatically merges those neighboring regions that produce the largest increase in modularity index. When the modularity of the segmented image is maximized, the algorithm stops merging and produces the final segmented image. To preserve the repetitive patterns in a homogeneous region, we propose a feature on the basis of the histogram of states of image gradients and use it together with the color feature to characterize the similarity of two regions. By constructing the similarity matrix in an adaptive manner, the oversegmentation problem can be effectively avoided. Our algorithm is tested on the publicly available Berkeley Segmentation Data Set as well as the semantic segmentation data set and compared with other popular algorithms. Experimental results have demonstrated that our algorithm produces sizable segmentation, preserves repetitive patterns with appealing time complexity, and achieves object-level segmentation to some extent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we investigate the energy-efficient job-dispatching algorithm for transcoding as a service (TaaS) in a multimedia cloud. We aim to minimize the energy consumption of service engines in the cloud while achieving low delay for TaaS. We formulate the job-dispatching problem as a constrained optimization problem under the framework of Lyapunov optimization. Using the drift-plus-penalty function, we propose an online algorithm that dispatches the transcoding jobs to service engines, with an objective to Reduce Energy consumption while achieving the QUEue STability (REQUEST). We first characterize the fundamental tradeoff between energy consumption and queue delay for the REQUEST algorithm numerically and obtain its performance bound theoretically. Second, we study the robustness of the REQUEST algorithm, with numerical results indicating that the REQUEST algorithm is robust to the inaccuracy of estimating the transcoding time. Third, we compare the performance of the REQUEST algorithm with the other two algorithms, i.e., the Round Robin and Random Rate algorithms. By simulation and real trace data, we show that by appropriately choosing the control variable, the REQUEST algorithm outperforms the Round Robin and Random Rate algorithms, with smaller time average energy consumption and time average queue length. The proposed REQUEST algorithm can be applied in cloud-assisted multimedia transcoding service. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]