Edge computing satisfies the stringent latency requirements of data access and processing for applications running on edge devices. The data location service is a key function to provide data storage and retrieval to enable these applications. However, it still lacks research of a scalable and low-latency data location service in mobile edge computing. Meanwhile, the existing solutions, such as DNS and DHT, fail to meet the low latency requirement of mobile edge computing. This paper presents a low-latency hybrid data-sharing framework, HDS, in which the data location service is divided into two parts: intra-region and inter-region. In the intra-region part, we design a data sharing protocol called Cuckoo Summary to achieve fast data localization. In the inter-region part, we develop a geographic routing based scheme to achieve efficient data localization with only one overlay hop. The advantages of HDS include short response latency, low implementation overhead, and few false positives. We implement our HDS framework based on a P4 prototype. The experimental results show that, compared to the state-of-the-art solutions, our design achieves 50.21% shorter lookup paths and 92.75% fewer false positives.

The hierarchical mobile edge computing satisfies the stringent latency requirements of data access and processing for emerging edge applications. The data location service is a basic function to provide data storage and retrieval to enable these applications. However, it still lacks research of a scalable and low-latency data location service in the environment. The existing solutions, such as DNS and DHT, fail to meet the requirement of those latency-sensitive applications. Therefore, in this article, we present a low-latency hybrid data-sharing framework, HDS. The HDS divides the data location service into two parts: intra-region and inter-region. More precisely, we design a data sharing protocol called Cuckoo Summary to achieve fast data localization in intra-region. Furthermore, for the inter-region data sharing, we develop a geographic routing based scheme to achieve efficient data localization with only one overlay hop. The advantages of HDS include short response latency, low implementation overhead, and few false positives. We implement the HDS framework based on a P4 prototype. The experimental results show that, compared to the state-of-the-art solutions, our design achieves 50.21% shorter lookup paths and 92.75% fewer false positives.

There have been increasing interests in exploring the sensing capabilities of RFID to enable numerous IoT applications, including object localization, trajectory tracking, and human behavior sensing. However, most existing methods rely on the signal measurement either in a low multipath environment, which is unlikely to exist in many practical situations, or with special devices, which increase the operating cost. This paper investigates the possibility of measuring ‘multi-path-free’ signal information in multipath-prevalent environments simply using a commodity RFID reader. The proposed solution, Clean Physical Information Extraction (CPIX), is universal, accurate, and compatible to standard protocols and devices. CPIX improves RFID sensing quality with near zero cost – it requires no extra device. We implement CPIX and study three major RFID sensing applications: tag localization, device calibration and human behavior sensing. CPIX reduces the localization error by 30% to 50% and achieves the MOST accurate localization by commodity readers compared to existing work. It also significantly improves the quality of device calibration and human behaviour sensing.

We propose to study mobile object tracing, which allows a mobile system to report the shape, location, and trajectory of the mobile objects appearing in a video camera and identifies each of them with its cyber-identity (ID), even if the appearances of the objects are not known to the system. Existing tracking methods either cannot match objects with their cyber-IDs or rely on complex vision modules pre-learned from vast and well-annotated datasets including the appearances of the target objects, which may not exist in practice. We design and implement TagAttention, a vision-RFID fusion system that achieves mobile object tracing without the knowledge of the target object appearances and hence can be used in many applications that need to track arbitrary un-registered objects. TagAttention adopts the visual attention mechanism, through which RF signals can direct the visual system to detect and track target objects with unknown appearances. Experiments show TagAttention can actively discover, identify, and track the target objects while matching them with their cyber-IDs by using commercial sensing devices in complex environments with various multipath reflectors. It only requires around one second to detect and localize a new mobile target appearing in the video and keeps tracking it accurately over time.

To simulate the concept acquisition and binding of different senses in the brain, a biologically inspired neural network model named perception coordination network (PCN) is proposed. It is a hierarchical structure, which is functionally divided into the primary sensory area (PSA), the primary sensory association area (SAA), and the higher order association area (HAA). The PSA contains feature neurons which respond to many elementary features, e.g., colors, shapes, syllables, and basic flavors. The SAA contains primary concept neurons which combine the elementary features in the PSA to represent unimodal concept of objects, e.g., the image of an apple, the Chinese word ``[píng guǒ]'' which names the apple, and the taste of the apple. The HAA contains associated neurons which connect the primary concept neurons of several PSA, e.g., connects the image, the taste, and the name of an apple. It means that the associated neurons have a multimodal response mode. Therefore, this area executes multisensory integration. PCN is an online incremental learning system, it is able to continuously acquire and bind multimodality concepts in an online way. The experimental results suggest that PCN is able to handle the multimodal concept acquisition and binding effectively.

As the primary channel for users to report and resolve service issues, customer care has historically been a critical and resource-intensive aspect of operating cellular networks. However, owing to the inherent complexity in correlating network events with the service performance experienced by individual users, adoption of data-driven solutions leveraging network data for realtime troubleshooting during customer care calls has remained a challenge to cellular service providers (CSPs). In this work, we propose a novel ML aSsisted cEllular sErvice diagNosis (SEEN) solution that infers the cause of user service issues from performance metrics observed from network and assists care agents during customer care calls. Our extensive evaluations demonstrated that SEEN can accurately identify the root cause of user reported performance issues in >80% cases, without relying on information provided by users. Accurate root cause prediction coupled with automated recommended resolution actions implemented in SEEN, lead to significant reduction in handling time to resolve service issues and in trouble tickets volume, improving customer satisfaction and reducing customer care operational expense. Benefit of SEEN is further demonstrated by field deployment in a large CSP.