Cloud computing is an established technology allowing users to share resources on a large scale, never before seen in IT history. A cloud system connects multiple individual servers in order to process related tasks in several environments at the same time. Clouds are typically more cost-effective than single computers of comparable computing performance. The sheer physical size of the system itself means that thousands of machines may be involved. The focus of this research was to design a strategy to dynamically allocate tasks without overloading Cloud nodes which would result in system stability being maintained at minimum cost. This research has added the following new contributions to the state of knowledge: (i) a novel taxonomy and categorisation of three classes of schedulers, namely OS-level, Cluster and Big Data, which highlight their unique evolution and underline their different objectives; (ii) an abstract model of cloud resources utilisation is specified, including multiple types of resources and consideration of task migration costs; (iii) a virtual machine live migration was experimented with in order to create a formula which estimates the network traffic generated by this process; (iv) a high-fidelity Cloud workload simulator, based on a month-long workload traces from Google's computing cells, was created; (v) two possible approaches to resource management were proposed and examined in the practical part of the manuscript: the centralised metaheuristic load balancer and the decentralised agent-based system. The project involved extensive experiments run on the University of Westminster HPC cluster, and the promising results are presented together with detailed discussions and a conclusion.

--Customer churn prediction in the telecommunications sector represents a critical business intelligence task that has evolved from subjective human assessment to sophisticated algorithmic approaches. In this work, we present a comprehensive framework for telecommunications churn prediction leveraging deep neural networks. Through systematic problem formulation, rigorous dataset analysis, and careful feature engineering, we develop a model that captures complex patterns in customer behavior indicative of potential churn. We conduct extensive empirical evaluations across multiple performance metrics, demonstrating that our proposed neural architecture achieves significant improvements over existing baseline methods. Our approach not only advances the state-of-the-art in churn prediction accuracy but also provides interpretable insights into the key factors driving customer attrition in telecommunications services.

Abstract--Recent progress in robotics has underscored the demand for real-time control in applications such as manufacturing and healthcare systems, where the timely delivery of mission-critical commands under heterogeneous robotic traffic is paramount for operational efficacy and safety. In these scenarios, mission-critical traffic follows a strict deadline-constrained communication pattern: commands must arrive within defined deadlines, otherwise late arrivals can degrade performance or destabilize control loops. In this work, we demonstrate on a real-time software-defined radio (SDR) platform that CSMA, widely adopted in robotic communications, suffers severe degradation with contention-induced collisions and delays disrupting the on-time arrival of mission-critical packets. This degradation arises under a common robotic traffic pattern where non-critical traffic dominates the channel, while lightweight mission-critical commands must be delivered frequently with strict deadlines over the shared medium. T o address this, we propose an IEEE 802.11-compatible hybrid TDMA/CSMA protocol that combines TDMA's deterministic slot scheduling with CSMA's adaptability for heterogeneous robot traffic. The protocol achieves collision-free, low-latency mission-critical command delivery and IEEE 802.11 compatibility through the synergistic integration of sub-microsecond PTP-based slot synchronization, a three-section superframe with dynamic TDMA allocation for structured and adaptable traffic management, and beacon-NA V protection to preemptively secure critical communication applications from interference. Emulation experiments on a real-time SDR testbed show that the proposed protocol reduces missed-deadline errors by 93% compared to the CSMA baseline under a robotic traffic setup at an overall aggregate channel load of 77.1%, wherein 99.9% of the traffic is from non time-critical applications and 0.1% of the traffic is from deadline-constraint applications. In a high-speed robot path-tracking Robot Operating System (ROS) simulation, the protocol lowers root mean square trajectory error by up to 90% compared with the CSMA baseline, while maintaining throughput for non-critical traffic within 2%. Robotics has undergone remarkable advancements in recent years, playing critical roles in domains such as manufacturing [1], healthcare [2]-[4], and autonomous systems [5]. Multi-robot cooperation has emerged as a key enabler for complex robotic applications that require seamless coordination among multiple devices, such as collaborative assembly [6], warehouse automation [7], and search-and-rescue missions [8]. The work was partially supported by the Shen Zhen-Hong Kong-Macao technical program (Type C) under Grant No. SGDX20230821094359004. As the number of robots grows rapidly in a multi-robot system, communications between robots are becoming increasingly data-intensive.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities across various fields. However, their performance in technical domains such as telecommunications remains underexplored. This paper evaluates two open-source LLMs, Gemma 3 27B and DeepSeek R1 32B, on factual and reasoning-based questions derived from advanced wireless communications material. We construct a benchmark of 105 question-answer pairs and assess performance using lexical metrics, semantic similarity, and LLM-as-a-judge scoring. We also analyze consistency, judgment reliability, and hallucination through source attribution and score variance. Results show that Gemma excels in semantic fidelity and LLM-rated correctness, while DeepSeek demonstrates slightly higher lexical consistency. Additional findings highlight current limitations in telecom applications and the need for domain-adapted models to support trustworthy Artificial Intelligence (AI) assistants in engineering.

Bluetooth-based mesh networks offer a promising infrastructure for offline communication in emergency and resource constrained scenarios. However, traditional routing strategies such as Ad hoc On-Demand Distance Vector (AODV) often degrade under congestion and dynamic topological changes. This study proposes a hybrid intelligent routing framework that augments AODV with supervised machine learning to improve next-hop selection under varied network constraints. The framework integrates four predictive models: a delivery success classifier, a TTL regressor, a delay regressor, and a forwarder suitability classifier, into a unified scoring mechanism that dynamically ranks neighbors during multi-hop message transmission. A simulation environment with stationary node deployments was developed, incorporating buffer constraints and device heterogeneity to evaluate three strategies: baseline AODV, a partial hybrid ML model (ABC), and the full hybrid ML model (ABCD). Across ten scenarios, the Hybrid ABCD model achieves approximately 99.97 percent packet delivery under these controlled conditions, significantly outperforming both the baseline and intermediate approaches. The results demonstrate that lightweight, explainable machine learning models can enhance routing reliability and adaptability in Bluetooth mesh networks, particularly in infrastructure-less environments where delivery success is prioritized over latency constraints.

Traditional approaches to network management have been accessible only to a handful of highly-trained network operators with significant expert knowledge. This creates barriers for lay users to easily manage their networks without resorting to experts. With recent development of powerful large language models (LLMs) for language comprehension, we design a system to make network management accessible to a broader audience of non-experts by allowing users to converse with networks in natural language. To effectively leverage advancements in LLMs, we propose an agentic framework that uses an intermediate representation to streamline configuration across diverse vendor equipment, retrieves the network state from memory in real-time, and provides an interface for external feedback. We also conduct pilot studies to collect real user data of natural language utterances for network control, and present a visualization interface to facilitate dialogue-driven user interaction and enable large-scale data collection for future development. Preliminary experiments validate the effectiveness of our proposed system components with LLM integration on both synthetic and real user utterances. Through our data collection and visualization efforts, we pave the way for more effective use of LLMs and democratize network control for everyday users.

Accurately predicting spatio-temporal network traffic is essential for dynamically managing computing resources in modern communication systems and minimizing energy consumption. Although spatio-temporal traffic prediction has received extensive research attention, further improvements in prediction accuracy and computational efficiency remain necessary. In particular, existing decomposition-based methods or hybrid architectures often incur heavy overhead when capturing local and global feature correlations, necessitating novel approaches that optimize accuracy and complexity. In this paper, we propose an efficient spatio-temporal network traffic prediction framework, DP-LET, which consists of a data processing module, a local feature enhancement module, and a Transformer-based prediction module. The data processing module is designed for high-efficiency denoising of network data and spatial decoupling. In contrast, the local feature enhancement module leverages multiple Temporal Convolutional Networks (TCNs) to capture fine-grained local features. Meanwhile, the prediction module utilizes a Transformer encoder to model long-term dependencies and assess feature relevance. A case study on real-world cellular traffic prediction demonstrates the practicality of DP-LET, which maintains low computational complexity while achieving state-of-the-art performance, significantly reducing MSE by 31.8% and MAE by 23.1% compared to baseline models.

To tap into the growing market of cloud gaming, whereby game graphics is rendered in the cloud and streamed back to the user as a video feed, network operators are creating monetizable assurance services that dynamically provision network resources. However, without accurately measuring cloud gaming user experience, they cannot assess the effectiveness of their provisioning methods. Basic measures such as bandwidth and frame rate by themselves do not suffice, and can only be interpreted in the context of the game played and the player activity within the game. This paper equips the network operator with a method to obtain a real-time measure of cloud gaming experience by analyzing network traffic, including contextual factors such as the game title and player activity stage. Our method is able to classify the game title within the first five seconds of game launch, and continuously assess the player activity stage as being active, passive, or idle. We deploy it in an ISP hosting NVIDIA cloud gaming servers for the region. We provide insights from hundreds of thousands of cloud game streaming sessions over a three-month period into the dependence of bandwidth consumption and experience level on the gameplay contexts.

Abstract--Accurate outdoor positioning in cellular networks is hindered by sparse, heterogeneous measurement collections and the high cost of exhaustive site surveys. This paper introduces a lightweight, modular mobile data augmentation framework designed to enhance multi-cell fingerprinting-based positioning using operator-collected minimization of drive test (MDT) records. The proposed approach decouples spatial and radio-feature synthesis: kernel density estimation (KDE) models the empirical spatial distribution to generate geographically coherent synthetic locations, while a k-nearest-neighbor (KNN)-based block produces augmented per-cell radio fingerprints. The architecture is intentionally training-free, interpretable, and suitable for distributed or on-premise operator deployments, supporting privacy-aware workflows. We both validate each augmentation module independently and assess its end-to-end impact on fingerprinting-based positioning using a real-world MDT dataset provided by an Italian mobile network operator across diverse urban and peri-urban scenarios. Results show that the proposed KDE-KNN augmentation consistently improves positioning performance, with the largest benefits in sparsely sampled or structurally complex regions; we also observe region-dependent saturation effects as augmentation increases. The framework offers a practical, low-complexity path to enhance operator positioning services using existing mobile data traces. ECENT years have seen a growing demand for accurate and reliable positioning services in dense urban areas, indoor environments, and under adverse weather conditions, such as overcast skies, where satellite-based systems like the global positioning system (GPS) often suffer from severe multipath propagation, signal blockage, urban canyon effects, and are known to be power-intensive, making it unsuitable for energy-constrained devices commonly used in mobile applications [1]. In these scenarios, multicell fingerprint-based positioning has emerged as a promising approach due to its robustness in non-line-of-sight conditions and the ability to leverage existing cellular infrastructure [2, 3].

Abstract--Localized statistical channel modeling (LSCM) is crucial for effective performance evaluation in digital twin-assisted network optimization. Solely relying on the multi-beam reference signal receiving power (RSRP), LSCM aims to model the localized statistical propagation environment by estimating the channel angular power spectrum (APS). However, existing methods rely heavily on drive test data with high collection costs and limited spatial coverage. In this paper, we propose a measurement report (MR) data-driven framework for LSCM, exploiting the low-cost and extensive collection of MR data. The framework comprises two novel modules. The MR localization module addresses the issue of missing locations in MR data by introducing a semi-supervised method based on hypergraph neural networks, which exploits multi-modal information via distance-aware hypergraph modeling and hypergraph convolution for location extraction. T o enhance the computational efficiency and solution robustness, LSCM operates at the grid level. Compared to independently constructing geographically uniform grids and estimating channel APS, the joint grid construction and channel APS estimation module enhances robustness in complex environments with spatially non-uniform data by exploiting their correlation. This module alternately optimizes grid partitioning and APS estimation using clustering and improved sparse recovery for the ill-conditioned measurement matrix and incomplete observations. Through comprehensive experiments on a real-world MR dataset, we demonstrate the superior performance and robustness of our framework in localization and channel modeling. ITH the rapid evolution of wireless communications, network optimization has become increasingly critical for the development and deployment of next-generation wireless networks [1]-[3]. The work was supported in part by the National Key Research and Development Program of China under Grant 2024YFA1014201 (Corresponding author: Tsung-Hui Chang).