arXiv subjects

Yang Xu

Publications and source records attributed to Yang Xu.

At least 397 records · Page 22Linked to original sources

arXiv2019

In-network Congestion-aware Load Balancing at Transport Layer

Load balancing at transport layer is an important function in data centers, content delivery networks, and mobile networks, where per-connection consistency (PCC) has to be met for optimal performance. Cloud-native L4 load balancers are commonly deployed as virtual network functions (VNFs) and are a critical forwarding element in modern cloud infrastructure. We identify load imbalance among service instances as the main cause of additional processing delay caused by transport-layer load balancers. Existing transport-layer load balancers rely on one of two methods: host-level traffic redirection, which may add as much as 12.48% additional traffic to underlying networks, or connection tracking, which consumes a considerable amount of memory in load balancers. Both of these methods result in inefficient usage of network resources. We propose the in-network congestion-aware load Balancer (INCAB) to achieve even load distribution among service instances and optimal network resources usage in addition to meeting the PCC requirement. We show that INCAB is capable of identifying and monitoring each instance's most-utilized resource and can improve the load distribution among all service instances. INCAB utilizes a Bloom filter and an ultra-compact connection table for in-network flow distribution. Furthermore, it does not rely on end hosts for traffic redirection. Our flow level simulations show that INCAB improves flows' average completion time by 31.97% compared to stateless solutions.

cs.NI↗

arXiv2019

Fourier-based Rotation-invariant Feature Boosting: An Efficient Framework for Geospatial Object Detection

Geospatial object detection of remote sensing imagery has been attracting an increasing interest in recent years, due to the rapid development in spaceborne imaging. Most of previously proposed object detectors are very sensitive to object deformations, such as scaling and rotation. To this end, we propose a novel and efficient framework for geospatial object detection in this letter, called Fourier-based rotation-invariant feature boosting (FRIFB). A Fourier-based rotation-invariant feature is first generated in polar coordinate. Then, the extracted features can be further structurally refined using aggregate channel features. This leads to a faster feature computation and more robust feature representation, which is good fitting for the coming boosting learning. Finally, in the test phase, we achieve a fast pyramid feature extraction by estimating a scale factor instead of directly collecting all features from image pyramid. Extensive experiments are conducted on two subsets of NWPU VHR-10 dataset, demonstrating the superiority and effectiveness of the FRIFB compared to previous state-of-the-art methods.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2019

Pressure-controlled interlayer magnetism in atomically thin CrI3

Stacking order can significantly influence the physical properties of two-dimensional (2D) van der Waals materials. The recent isolation of atomically thin magnetic materials opens the door for control and design of magnetism via stacking order. Here we apply hydrostatic pressure up to 2 GPa to modify the stacking order in a prototype van der Waals magnetic insulator CrI3. We observe an irreversible interlayer antiferromagnetic (AF) to ferromagnetic (FM) transition in atomically thin CrI3 by magnetic circular dichroism and electron tunneling measurements. The effect is accompanied by a monoclinic to a rhombohedral stacking order change characterized by polarized Raman spectroscopy. Before the structural change, the interlayer AF coupling energy can be tuned up by nearly 100% by pressure. Our experiment reveals interlayer FM coupling, which is the established ground state in bulk CrI3, but never observed in native exfoliated thin films. The observed correlation between the magnetic ground state and the stacking order is in good agreement with first principles calculations and suggests a route towards nanoscale magnetic textures by moiré engineering.

cond-mat.mes-hall↗

arXiv2019

Toward Optimal Performance with Network Assisted TCP at Mobile Edge

In contrast to the classic fashion for designing distributed end-to-end (e2e) TCP schemes for cellular networks (CN), we explore another design space by having the CN assist the task of the transport control. We show that in the emerging cellular architectures such as mobile/multi-access edge computing (MEC), where the servers are located close to the radio access network (RAN), significant improvements can be achieved by leveraging the nature of the logically centralized network measurements at the RAN and passing information such as its minimum e2e delay and access link capacity to each server. Particularly, a Network Assistance module (located at the mobile edge) will pair up with wireless scheduler to provide feedback information to each server and facilitate the task of congestion control. To that end, we present two Network Assisted schemes called NATCP (a clean-slate design replacing TCP at end-hosts) and NACubic (a backward compatible design requiring no change for TCP at end-hosts). Our preliminary evaluations using real cellular traces show that both schemes dramatically outperform existing schemes both in single-flow and multi-flow scenarios.

cs.NI↗

arXiv2019

Enabling Mobility in LTE-Compatible Mobile-edge Computing with Programmable Switches

Network softwarization triggered a new wave of innovation in modern network design. The next generation of mobile networks embraces this trend. Mobile-edge computing (MEC) is a key part of emerging mobile networks that enables ultra-low latency mission-critical application such as vehicle-to vehicle communication. MEC aims at bringing delay-sensitive applications closer to the radio access network to enable ultra-low latency for users and decrease the back-haul pressure on mobile service providers. However, there are no practical solutions to enable mobility at MEC where connections are no longer anchored to the core network and serving applications are supposed to move as their users move. We propose the mobile-edge gateway (MEGW) to address this gap. MEGW enables mobility for MEC applications transparently and without requiring any modifications to existing protocols and applications. MEGW supports mobility by reconstructing mobile users' location via listening to LTE control plane in addition to using two-stage location-dependent traffic steering for edge connections. Networks can incrementally upgrade to support MEC by upgrading some IP router to programmable switches that run MEGW. We have implemented MEGW using P4 language and verified its compatibility with existing LTE networks in a testbed running reference LTE protocol stack. Furthermore, using packet-level simulations we show that the two-stage traffic steering algorithm reduces the number of application migrations and simplifies service provisioning.

cs.NI↗

arXiv2019

RetroFlow: Maintaining Control Resiliency and Flow Programmability for Software-Defined WANs

Providing resilient network control is a critical concern for deploying Software-Defined Networking (SDN) into Wide-Area Networks (WANs). For performance reasons, a Software-Defined WAN is divided into multiple domains controlled by multiple controllers with a logically centralized view. Under controller failures, we need to remap the control of offline switches from failed controllers to other active controllers. Existing solutions could either overload active controllers to interrupt their normal operations or degrade network performance because of increasing the controller-switch communication overhead. In this paper, we propose RetroFlow to achieve low communication overhead without interrupting the normal processing of active controllers during controller failures. By intelligently configuring a set of selected offline switches working under the legacy routing mode, RetroFlow relieves the active controllers from controlling the selected offline switches while maintaining the flow programmability (e.g., the ability to change paths of flows) of SDN. RetroFlow also smartly transfers the control of offline switches with the SDN routing mode to active controllers to minimize the communication overhead from these offline switches to the active controllers. Simulation results show that compared with the baseline algorithm, RetroFlow can reduce the communication overhead up to 52.6% during a moderate controller failure by recovering 100% flows from offline switches and can reduce the communication overhead up to 61.2% during a serious controller failure by setting to recover 90% of flows from offline switches.

cs.NI↗

arXiv2019

Tuning insulator-semimetal transitions in 3D topological insulator thin films by inter-surface hybridization and in-plane magnetic fields

A pair of Dirac points (analogous to a vortex-antivortex pair) associated with opposite topological numbers (with $\pmπ$ Berry phases) can be merged together through parameter tuning and annihilated to gap the Dirac spectrum, offering a canonical example of a topological phase transition. Here, we report transport studies on thin films of BiSbTeSe$_2$ (BSTS), which is a 3D TI that hosts spin-helical gapless (semi-metallic) Dirac fermion surface states (SS) for sufficiently thick samples, with an observed resistivity close to $h/4e^2$ at the charge neutral point. When the sample thickness is reduced to $\sim$10 nm thick, the Dirac cones from the top and bottom surfaces can hybridize (analogous to a "merging" in the real space) and become gapped to give a trivial insulator. Furthermore, we observe that an in-plane magnetic field can drive the system again towards a metallic behavior, with a prominent negative magnetoresistance (MR, up to $\sim$$-$95\%) and a temperature-insensitive resistivity close to $h/2e^2$ at the charge neutral point. The observation is interpreted in terms of a predicted effect of an in-plane magnetic field to reduce the hybridization gap (which, if small enough, may be smeared by disorder and a metallic behavior). A sufficiently strong magnetic field is predicted to restore and split again the Dirac points in the momentum space, inducing a distinct 2D topological semimetal (TSM) phase with 2 single-fold Dirac cones of opposite spin-momentum windings.

cond-mat.mes-hall↗

arXiv2019

Spotlight: Scalable Transport Layer Load Balancing for Data Center Networks

Load Balancing plays a vital role in modern data centers to distribute traffic among instances of network functions or services. State-of-the-art load balancers such as Silkroad dispatch traffic obliviously without considering the real-time utilization of service instances and therefore can lead to uneven load distribution and suboptimal performance. In this paper, we design and implement Spotlight, a scalable and distributed load balancing architecture that maintains connection-to-instance mapping consistency at the edge of data center networks. Spotlight uses a new stateful flow dispatcher which periodically polls instances' load and dispatches incoming connections to instances in proportion to their available capacity. Our design utilizes distributed control plane and in-band flow dispatching and thus scales horizontally in data center networks. Through extensive flow-level simulation and packet-level experiments on a testbed, we demonstrate that compared to existing methods Spotlight distributes the traffic more efficiently and has near-optimum performance in terms of overall service utilization. Moreover, Spotlight is not sensitive to utilization polling interval and therefore can be implemented with low polling frequency to reduce the amount of control traffic. Indeed, Spotlight achieves the mentioned performance improvements using O(100ms) polling interval.

cs.NI↗

arXiv2019

Attention-based Walking Gait and Direction Recognition in Wi-Fi Networks

The study of human gait recognition has been becoming an active research field. In this paper, we propose to adopt the attention-based Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) encoder-decoder framework to implement a cycle-independent human gait and walking direction recognition system in Wi-Fi networks. For capturing more human walking dynamics, two receivers together with one transmitter are deployed in different spatial layouts. In the proposed system, the Channel State Information (CSI) measurements from different receivers are first gathered together and refined to form an integrated walking profile. Then, the RNN encoder reads and encodes the walking profile into primary feature vectors. Given a specific recognition task, the decoder computes a corresponding attention vector which is a weighted sum of the primary features assigned with different attentions, and is finally used to predict the target. The attention scheme motivates our system to learn to adaptively align with different critical clips of CSI data sequence for human walking gait and direction recognitions. We implement our system on commodity Wi-Fi devices in indoor environment, and the experimental results demonstrate that our system can achieve average F1 scores of 89.69% for gait recognition from a group of 8 subjects and 95.06% for direction recognition from 8 walking directions, in addition, the average accuracies of these two recognition tasks both exceed 97%.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2018

C2TCP: A Flexible Cellular TCP to Meet Stringent Delay Requirements

Since current widely available network protocols/systems are mainly throughput-oriented designs, meeting stringent delay requirements of new applications such as virtual reality and vehicle-to-vehicle communications on cellular network requires new network protocol/system designs. C2TCP is an effort toward that new design direction. C2TCP is inspired by in-network active queue management (AQM) designs such as RED and CoDel and motivated by lack of a flexible end-to-end (e2e) approach which can adapt itself to different applications' QoS requirements without modifying any network devices. It copes with unique challenges in cellular networks for achieving ultra-low latency (including highly variable channels, deep per-user buffers, self-inflicted queuing delays, radio uplink/downlink scheduling delays) and intends to satisfy stringent delay requirements of different applications while maximizing the throughput. C2TCP works on top of classic throughput-oriented TCP and accommodates various target delays without requiring any channel prediction, network state profiling, or complicated rate adjustment mechanisms. We have evaluated C2TCP in both real-world environment and extensive trace-based emulations and compared its performance with different TCP variants and state-of-the-art schemes including PCC-Vivace, Google's BBR, Verus, Sprout, TCP Westwood, and Cubic. Results show that C2TCP outperforms all these schemes and achieves lower average delay, jitter, and 95th percentile delay for packets.

cs.NI↗

arXiv2018

Interference of Electromagnetic waves in the background of the gravitational waves

Based on the relationship between proper distance and coordinate distance, the geometrical phenomenon caused by the passing gravitational waves can not be observed locally. The electromagnetic wave equations in the background gravitational waves are studied. We find that the expansion and contraction of wave lengths are always synchronous with the objects it measures. The background of the gravitational waves leads to dissipation and dispersion in the propagation of electromagnetic wave. The phase of the gravitational waves control the dissipation term and dispersion term in the telegrapher's equation. The linearly polarized laser beam propagating in the direction of the incoming gravitational waves can give a possible measurement on the local metric. In case of the pulsed beats passing by, the relaxation time is greater than the period of the gravitational waves, thus the detector may only show a signal of the modulation of the beats. Finally we proposed a non-local interference experiment to detect the high-frequency gravitational waves. It is similar to the measurement of redshift caused by gravitation. Together with the ordinary detector, it will give us further and mutually measurements of the gravitational waves.

gr-qc↗

arXiv2018

High-speed and high-responsivity hybrid silicon/black-phosphorus waveguide photodetectors at 2 μm

Silicon photonics is being extended from the near-infrared (near-IR) window of 1.3-1.5 μm for optical fiber communications to the mid-infrared (mid-IR) wavelength-band of 2 μm or longer for satisfying the increasing demands in many applications. Mid-IR waveguide photodetectors on silicon have attracted intensive attention as one of the indispensable elements for various photonic systems. Previously high-performance waveguide photodetectors on silicon were realized for the near-IR window of 1.3-1.5 μm by introducing another semiconductor material (e.g., Ge, and III-V compounds) in the active region. Unfortunately, these traditional semiconductor materials do not work well for the wavelength of ~2 μm or longer because the light absorption becomes very weak. As an alternative, two-dimensional materials provide a new and promising option for enabling active photonic devices on silicon. Here black-phosphorus (BP) thin films with optimized medium thicknesses (~40 nm) are introduced as the active material for light absorption and silicon/BP hybrid ridge waveguide photodetectors are demonstrated with a high responsivity at a low bias voltage. And up to 4.0Gbps data transmission is achieved at 2μm.

physics.app-ph↗

arXiv2018

Transport measurements in twisted bilayer graphene: Electron-phonon coupling and Landau level crossing

We investigate electronic transport in twisted bilayer graphene (tBLG) under variable temperatures ($T$), carrier densities ($n$), and transverse magnetic fields, focusing on samples with small-twist-angles ($θ$). These samples show prominent signatures associated with the van Hove singularities (VHSs) and superlattice-induced mini-gaps (SMGs). Temperature-dependent field effect measurement shows that the difference between temperature-dependent resistivity and residual resistivity, $ρ_{xx}(n,T) - ρ_{0}(n)$, follows $~T^β$ for $n$ between the main Dirac point (DP) and SMG. The evolution of the temperature exponent $β$ with $n$ exhibits a W-shaped dependence, with minima of $β$ ~0.9 near the VHSs and maxima of $β$ ~1.7 toward the SMGs. This W-shaped behavior can be qualitatively understood with a theoretical picture that considers both the Fermi surface smearing near the VHSs and flexural-acoustic phonon scattering. In the quantum Hall regime, we observe only Landau level crossings in the massless Dirac spectrum originating from the main DP but not in the parabolic band near the SMG. Such crossings enable the measurement of an enhanced interlayer dielectric constant, attributed to a reduced Fermi velocity. Moreover, we measure the Fermi velocity, interlayer coupling strength, VHS energy relative to the DP, and gap size of SMG, four important parameters used to describe the peculiar band structure of the small-$θ$ tBLG.

cond-mat.mes-hall↗

arXiv2018

HyLine: a Simple and Practical Flow Scheduling for Commodity Datacenters

Today's datacenter networks (DCNs) have been built upon multipath topologies where each path contains multiple links. However, flow scheduling schemes proposed to minimize flow completion times (FCT) in DCNs are based on algorithms which are optimum or close-to-optimum only over single link. Moreover, most of these scheduling schemes seek either fully centralized approaches having overhead of communicating to a central entity or fully distributed approaches requiring changes in the fabric. Motivated by these shortcomings, we present HyLine a simple scheduling design for commodity DCNs which is equipped with a joint load-balancing and flow scheduling (path-aware) design exploiting the multipath nature of DCNs. HyLine takes a hybrid approach and uses the global-awareness of centralized and agility of distributed techniques without requiring any changes in the fabric. To that end, it determines a threshold margin identifying flows for which using centralized approach is beneficial. We have shown through extensive ns2 simulations that despite HyLine's simplicity, it significantly outperforms existing schemes and achieves lower average and 99th percentile FCTs. For instance, compared to Qjump-state-of-the-art practical scheme-and pFabric-one of the best performing flow scheduling schemes-HyLine reduces average FCT up to 68% and 31%, respectively, under a production datacenter workload.

cs.NI↗

arXiv2018

Cellular Controlled Delay TCP (C2TCP)

Cellular networks have special characteristics including highly variable channels, fast fluctuating capacities, deep per user buffers, self-inflicted queuing delays, radio uplink/downlink scheduling delays, etc. These distinguishing properties make the problem of achieving low latency and high throughput in cellular networks more challenging than in wired networks. That's why in this environment, TCP and its flavors, which are generally designed for wired networks, perform poorly. To cope with these challenges, we present C2TCP, a flexible end-to-end solution targeting interactive applications requiring high throughput and low delay in cellular networks. C2TCP stands on top of loss-based TCP and brings it delay sensitivity without requiring any network state profiling, channel prediction, or complicated rate adjustment mechanisms. The key idea behind C2TCP is to absorb dynamics of unpredictable cellular channels by investigating local minimum delay of packets in a moving time window and react to the cellular network's capacity changes very fast. Through extensive trace-based evaluations using traces from five commercial LTE and 3G networks, we have compared performance of C2TCP with various TCP variants, and state-of-the-art schemes including BBR, Verus, and Sprout. Results show that on average, C2TCP outperforms these schemes and achieves lower average and 95th percentile delay for packets.

cs.NI↗

arXiv2017

Two-dimensional material based "field-effect CCD"

Charge-coupled device (CCD), along with the complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS), is one of the major imaging technologies. Traditional CCDs rely on the charge transfer between potential wells, which gives them advantages of simple pixel structure, high sensitivity, and low noise. However, the serial transfer requires fabrication incompatible with CMOS, and leads to slower, more complex, and less flexible readout than random access. Here, we report a new-concept CCD called field-effect CCD (FE-CCD), which is based on the capacitive "coupling" between the semiconductor substrate and the 2D material. The strong field effect of the 2D material enables amplification, and non-destructive readout of the integrated charges in one pixel without transfer. We demonstrated the broadband response of our CCD (up to 1870 nm) and the successful integration of 2D hetero-structures for reducing the power consumption. The demonstrated FE-CCD provides a valuable strategy for versatile 2D materials to be monolithically integrated into the semiconductor imaging technology.

physics.app-ph↗

arXiv2017

Intervention On Default Contagion Under Partial Information

We model the default contagion process in a large heterogeneous financial network under the interventions of a regulator (a central bank) with only partial information which is a more realistic setting than most current literature. We provide the analytical results for the asymptotic optimal intervention policies and the asymptotic magnitude of default contagion in terms of the network characteristics. We extend the results of Amini et al. (2013) to incorporate interventions and the model of Amini et al. (2015); Amini et al. (2017) to heterogeneous networks with a given degree sequence and arbitrary initial equity levels. The insights from the results are that the optimal intervention policy is "monotonic" in terms of the intervention cost, the closeness to invulnerability and connectivity. Moreover, we should keep intervening on a bank once we have intervened on it. Our simulation results show a good agreement with the theoretical results.

q-fin.RM↗

arXiv2017

On Performance Modeling for MANETs under General Limited Buffer Constraint

Understanding the real achievable performance of mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) under practical network constraints is of great importance for their applications in future highly heterogeneous wireless network environments. This paper explores, for the first time, the performance modeling for MANETs under a general limited buffer constraint, where each network node maintains a limited source buffer of size $B_s$ to store its locally generated packets and also a limited shared relay buffer of size $B_r$ to store relay packets for other nodes. Based on the Queuing theory and birth-death chain theory, we first develop a general theoretical framework to fully depict the source/relay buffer occupancy process in such a MANET, which applies to any distributed MAC protocol and any mobility model that leads to the uniform distribution of nodes' locations in steady state. With the help of this framework, we then derive the exact expressions of several key network performance metrics, including achievable throughput, throughput capacity, and expected end-to-end delay. We further conduct case studies under two network scenarios and provide the corresponding theoretical/simulation results to demonstrate the application as well as the efficiency of our theoretical framework. Finally, we present extensive numerical results to illustrate the impacts of buffer constraint on the performance of a buffer-limited MANET.

cs.IT↗