network condition
ADataset for Analyzing Streaming Media Performance over HTTP/3 Browsers
HTTP/3 is a new application layer protocol supported by most browsers. It uses QUIC as an underlying transport protocol. QUIC provides multiple benefits, like faster connection establishment, reduced latency, and improved connection migration. Hence, popular browsers like Chrome/Chromium, Microsoft Edge, Apple Safari, and Mozilla Firefox have started supporting it. This paper presents an HTTP/3-supported browser dataset collection tool named H3B.
Demystifying Network Foundation Models
Beltiukov, Sylee, Guthula, Satyandra, Guo, Wenbo, Willinger, Walter, Gupta, Arpit
This work presents a systematic investigation into the latent knowledge encoded within Network Foundation Models (NFMs) that focuses on hidden representations analysis rather than pure downstream task performance. Different from existing efforts, we analyze the models through a three-part evaluation: Embedding Geometry Analysis to assess representation space utilization, Metric Alignment Assessment to measure correspondence with domain-expert features, and Causal Sensitivity Testing to evaluate robustness to protocol perturbations. Using five diverse network datasets spanning controlled and real-world environments, we evaluate four state-of-the-art NFMs, revealing that they all exhibit significant anisotropy, inconsistent feature sensitivity patterns, an inability to separate the high-level context, payload dependency, and other properties. Our work identifies numerous limitations across all models and demonstrates that addressing them can significantly improve model performance (by up to +0.35 $F_1$ score without architectural changes).
Chisme: Fully Decentralized Differentiated Deep Learning for IoT Intelligence
Kuttivelil, Harikrishna, Obraczka, Katia
As end-user device capability increases and demand for intelligent services at the Internet's edge rise, distributed learning has emerged as a key enabling technology. Existing approaches like federated learning (FL) and decentralized FL (DFL) enable distributed learning among clients, while gossip learning (GL) approaches have emerged to address the potential challenges in resource-constrained, connectivity-challenged infrastructure-less environments. However, most distributed learning approaches assume largely homogeneous data distributions and may not consider or exploit the heterogeneity of clients and their underlying data distributions. This paper introduces Chisme, a novel fully decentralized distributed learning algorithm designed to address the challenges of implementing robust intelligence in network edge contexts characterized by heterogeneous data distributions, episodic connectivity, and sparse network infrastructure. Chisme leverages cosine similarity-based data affinity heuristics calculated from received model exchanges to inform how much influence received models have when merging into the local model. By doing so, it facilitates stronger merging influence between clients with more similar model learning progressions, enabling clients to strategically balance between broader collaboration to build more general knowledge and more selective collaboration to build specific knowledge. We evaluate Chisme against contemporary approaches using image recognition and time-series prediction scenarios while considering different network connectivity conditions, representative of real-world distributed intelligent systems. Our experiments demonstrate that Chisme outperforms state-of-the-art edge intelligence approaches in almost every case -- clients using Chisme exhibit faster training convergence, lower final loss after training, and lower performance disparity between clients.
ASL360: AI-Enabled Adaptive Streaming of Layered 360ยฐ Video over UAV-assisted Wireless Networks
Mohammadhosseini, Alireza, Chakareski, Jacob, Mastronarde, Nicholas
We propose ASL360, an adaptive deep reinforcement learning-based scheduler for on-demand 360ยฐ video streaming to mobile VR users in next generation wireless networks. We aim to maximize the overall Quality of Experience (QoE) of the users served over a UAV-assisted 5G wireless network. Our system model comprises a macro base station (MBS) and a UAV-mounted base station which both deploy mm-Wave transmission to the users. The 360ยฐ video is encoded into dependent layers and segmented tiles, allowing a user to schedule downloads of each layer's segments. Furthermore, each user utilizes multiple buffers to store the corresponding video layer's segments. We model the scheduling decision as a Constrained Markov Decision Process (CMDP), where the agent selects Base or Enhancement layers to maximize the QoE and use a policy gradient-based method (PPO) to find the optimal policy. Additionally, we implement a dynamic adjustment mechanism for cost components, allowing the system to adaptively balance and prioritize the video quality, buffer occupancy, and quality change based on real-time network and streaming session conditions. We demonstrate that ASL360 significantly improves the QoE, achieving approximately 2 dB higher average video quality, 80% lower average rebuffering time, and 57% lower video quality variation, relative to competitive baseline methods. Our results show the effectiveness of our layered and adaptive approach in enhancing the QoE in immersive videostreaming applications, particularly in dynamic and challenging network environments.
SABR: A Stable Adaptive Bitrate Framework Using Behavior Cloning Pretraining and Reinforcement Learning Fine-Tuning
Luo, Pengcheng, Zhao, Yunyang, Zhang, Bowen, Yang, Genke, Soong, Boon-Hee, Yuen, Chau
With the advent of 5G, the internet has entered a new video-centric era. From short-video platforms like TikTok to long-video platforms like Bilibili, online video services are reshaping user consumption habits. Adaptive Bitrate (ABR) control is widely recognized as a critical factor influencing Quality of Experience (QoE). Recent learning-based ABR methods have attracted increasing attention. However, most of them rely on limited network trace sets during training and overlook the wide-distribution characteristics of real-world network conditions, resulting in poor generalization in out-of-distribution (OOD) scenarios. To address this limitation, we propose SABR, a training framework that combines behavior cloning (BC) pretraining with reinforcement learning (RL) fine-tuning. We also introduce benchmarks, ABRBench-3G and ABRBench-4G+, which provide wide-coverage training traces and dedicated OOD test sets for assessing robustness to unseen network conditions. Experimental results demonstrate that SABR achieves the best average rank compared with Pensieve, Comyco, and NetLLM across the proposed benchmarks. These results indicate that SABR enables more stable learning across wide distributions and improves generalization to unseen network conditions.
Cloud-Assisted Remote Control for Aerial Robots: From Theory to Proof-of-Concept Implementation
Seisa, Achilleas Santi, Sankaranarayanan, Viswa Narayanan, Damigos, Gerasimos, Satpute, Sumeet Gajanan, Nikolakopoulos, George
Cloud robotics has emerged as a promising technology for robotics applications due to its advantages of offloading computationally intensive tasks, facilitating data sharing, and enhancing robot coordination. However, integrating cloud computing with robotics remains a complex challenge due to network latency, security concerns, and the need for efficient resource management. In this work, we present a scalable and intuitive framework for testing cloud and edge robotic systems. The framework consists of two main components enabled by containerized technology: (a) a containerized cloud cluster and (b) the containerized robot simulation environment. The system incorporates two endpoints of a User Datagram Protocol (UDP) tunnel, enabling bidirectional communication between the cloud cluster container and the robot simulation environment, while simulating realistic network conditions. To achieve this, we consider the use case of cloud-assisted remote control for aerial robots, while utilizing Linux-based traffic control to introduce artificial delay and jitter, replicating variable network conditions encountered in practical cloud-robot deployments.
Benchmarking Federated Learning for Throughput Prediction in 5G Live Streaming Applications
Dutta, Yuvraj, Chatterjee, Soumyajit, Chakraborty, Sandip, Palit, Basabdatta
--Accurate and adaptive network throughput prediction is essential for latency-sensitive and bandwidth-intensive applications in 5G and emerging 6G networks. However, most existing methods rely on centralized training with uniformly collected data, limiting their applicability in heterogeneous mobile environments with non-IID data distributions. This paper presents the first comprehensive benchmarking of federated learning (FL) strategies for throughput prediction in realistic 5G edge scenarios. We evaluate three aggregation algorithms - F edAvg, F edProx, and F edBN-across four time-series architectures: LSTM, CNN, CNN+LSTM, and Transformer, using five diverse real-world datasets. We systematically analyze the effects of client heterogeneity, cohort size, and history window length on prediction performance. Our results reveal key trade-offs among model complexities, convergence rates, and generalization. It is found that F edBN consistently delivers robust performance under non-IID conditions. LSTM is, therefore, found to achieve a favorable balance between accuracy, rounds, and temporal footprint. T o validate the end-to-end applicability of the framework, we have integrated our FL-based predictors into a live adaptive streaming pipeline. It is seen that F edBN-based LSTM and Transformer models improve mean QoE scores by 11.7% and 11.4%, respectively, over F edAvg, while also reducing the variance. These findings offer actionable insights for building scalable, privacy-preserving, and edge-aware throughput prediction systems in next-generation wireless networks. HE increasing demand for high-bandwidth, low-latency applications in next-generation wireless networks, such as 5G and the emerging 6G, has made accurate and robust network throughput prediction indispensable for sustaining performance under dynamic and resource-constrained network conditions. Dutta and B.Palit are with the Department of Electronics and Communication Engineering, National Institute of Technology Rourkela, India - 769008.