Abstract-This paper considers the transmitter optimization problem for a multiuser downlink channel with multiple transmit antennas at the base-station. In contrast to the conventional sum-power constraint on the transmit antennas, this paper adopts a more realistic per-antenna power constraint, because in practical implementations each antenna is equipped with its own power amplifier and is limited individually by the linearity of the amplifier. Assuming perfect channel knowledge at the transmitter, this paper investigates two different transmission schemes under the per-antenna power constraint: a minimum-power beamforming design for downlink channels with a single antenna at each remote user and a capacity-achieving transmitter design for downlink channels with multiple antennas at each remote user. It is shown that in both cases, the per-antenna downlink transmitter optimization problem may be transformed into a dual uplink problem with an uncertain noise. This generalizes previous uplink-downlink duality results and transforms the per-antenna transmitter optimization problem into an equivalent minimax optimization problem. Further, it is shown that various notions of uplink-downlink duality may be unified under a Lagrangian duality framework. This new interpretation of duality gives rise to efficient numerical optimization techniques for solving the downlink per-antenna transmitter optimization problem.

We present a set of five axioms for fairness measures in resource allocation. A family of fairness measures satisfying the axioms is constructed. Well-known notions such as α-fairness, Jain's index, and entropy are shown to be special cases. Properties of fairness measures satisfying the axioms are proven, including Schur-concavity. Among the engineering implications is a generalized Jain's index that tunes the resolution of the fairness measure, a new understanding of α-fair utility functions, and an interpretation of "larger α is more fair". We also construct an alternative set of four axioms to capture efficiency objectives and feasibility constraints.

Transmit power in wireless cellular networks is a key degree of freedom in the management of interference, energy, and connectivity. Power control in both the uplink and downlink of a cellular network has been extensively studied, especially over the last 15 years, and some of the results have enabled the continuous evolution and significant impact of the digital cellular technology. This survey provides a comprehensive discussion of the models, algorithms, analysis, and methodologies in this vast and growing literature. It starts with a taxonomy of the wide range of power control problem formulations, and progresses from the basic formulation to more sophisticated ones. When transmit power is the only set of optimization variables, algorithms for fixed SIR are presented first, before turning to their robust versions and joint SIR and power optimization. This is followed by opportunistic and non-cooperative power control. Then joint control of power together with beamforming pattern, base station assignment, spectrum allocation, and transmit schedule is surveyed one-by-one.

Abstract. We consider inferring the future actions of people from a still image or a short video clip. Predicting future actions before they are actually executed is a critical ingredient for enabling us to effectively interact with other humans on a daily basis. However, challenges are two fold: First, we need to capture the subtle details inherent in human movements that may imply a future action; second, predictions usually should be carried out as quickly as possible in the social world, when limited prior observations are available. In this paper, we propose hierarchical movemes -a new representation to describe human movements at multiple levels of granularities, ranging from atomic movements (e.g. an open arm) to coarser movements that cover a larger temporal extent. We develop a max-margin learning framework for future action prediction, integrating a collection of moveme detectors in a hierarchical way. We validate our method on two publicly available datasets and show that it achieves very promising performance.

Abstract-Current data centers usually operate under poor utilization due to resource fragmentation. The hierarchical nature of data centers places a limit on the achievable aggregate bandwidth in the backbone. Suboptimal virtual machine placement also introduces unnecessary cross network traffic. In this paper, we solve a joint tenant (i.e., server or virtual machine) placement and route selection problem by exploiting multipath routing capability and dynamic virtual machine migration. These two complementary degrees of freedom: placement and routing, are mutually-dependent, and their joint optimization turns out to substantially improve data center efficiency. We propose (i) an offline algorithm that solves a static problem given a network snapshot, and (ii) an online solution for a dynamic environment with changing traffic. Leveraging and expanding the technique of Markov approximation, we propose an efficient online algorithm that requires a very small number of virtual machine migrations. Performance evaluation that employs the synthesized data center traffic traces, on various topologies and under a spectrum of elephant and mice workloads, demonstrates a consistent and significant improvement over the benchmark achieved by common heuristics used in today's data centers.

Abstract-Quantifying the notion of fairness is under-explored when there are multiple types of resources and users request different ratios of the different resources. A typical example is datacenters processing jobs with heterogeneous resource requirements on CPU, memory, network, bandwidth, etc. This paper develops a unifying framework addressing the fairnessefficiency tradeoff in light of multiple types of resources. We develop two families of fairness functions that provide different tradeoffs, characterize the effect of user requests' heterogeneity, and prove conditions under which these fairness measures satisfy the Pareto efficiency, sharing incentive, and envy-free properties. Intuitions behind the analysis are explained in two visualizations of multi-resource allocation. We also investigate people's fairness perceptions through an online survey of allocation preferences and provide a brief overview of related work on fairness.

Modern distributed storage systems offer large capacity to satisfy the exponentially increasing need of storage space. They often use erasure codes to protect against disk and node failures to increase reliability, while trying to meet the latency requirements of the applications and clients. This paper provides an insightful upper bound on the average service delay of such erasure-coded storage with arbitrary service time distribution and consisting of multiple heterogeneous files. Not only does the result supersede known delay bounds that only work for a single file or homogeneous files, it also enables a novel problem of joint latency and storage cost minimization over three dimensions: selecting the erasure code, placement of encoded chunks, and optimizing scheduling policy. The problem is efficiently solved via the computation of a sequence of convex approximations with provable convergence. We further prototype our solution in an open-source cloud storage deployment over three geographically distributed data centers. Experimental results validate our theoretical delay analysis and show significant latency reduction, providing valuable insights into the proposed latency-cost tradeoff in erasure-coded storage.

Quantifying the notion of fairness is under-explored when there are multiple types of resources and users request different ratios of the different resources. A typical example is datacenters processing jobs with heterogeneous resource requirements on CPU, memory, network, bandwidth, etc. This paper develops a unifying framework addressing the fairnessefficiency tradeoff in light of multiple types of resources. We develop two families of fairness functions that provide different tradeoffs, characterize the effect of user requests' heterogeneity, and prove conditions under which these fairness measures satisfy the Pareto efficiency, sharing incentive, and envy-free properties. Intuitions behind the analysis are explained in two visualizations of multi-resource allocation. We also investigate people's fairness perceptions through an online survey of allocation preferences and provide a brief overview of related work on fairness.