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Kyle Jamieson

Publications and source records attributed to Kyle Jamieson.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

StreamGuard: Exploring a 5G Architecture for Efficient, Quality of Experience-Aware Video Conferencing

Video conferencing over 5G is increasingly prevalent, yet its Quality of Experience (QoE) often degrades under limited radio resources. This has two causes: 5G networks must serve many users, while interactive traffic requires careful handling. Motivated by the insight that different subflows within an interactive session have a disproportionate effect on QoE, we present the design and implementation of StreamGuard, a practical 5G architecture for subflow-level, QoE-aware prioritization. StreamGuard forms a closed control loop with three components: (1) a monitor in the Radio Access Network (RAN) that uses deep packet inspection to infer QoE and RAN state, (2) a controller that selects prioritization actions to balance QoE and fairness, and (3) a marking module that applies these decisions by marking packets to steer subflows into appropriate priority queues. StreamGuard further shapes application behaviors via mechanisms including selective subflow dropping and probe-based rate control, to align application behavior with radio constraints. Implemented in a real 5G testbed, StreamGuard achieves a superior QoE-fairness tradeoff compared to vanilla 5G and prior state-of-the-art approaches, improving QoE by up to 70% at comparable background throughput or preserving up to 2x higher background throughput at similar QoE.

cs.NI

NeuralEmu: in situ Measurement-Driven, ML-based, High-Fidelity 5G Network Emulation

Current and future applications demand ultra-low latency and consistent throughput, yet frequently traverse 5G cellular networks, so cope with volatile packet dynamics, as 5G base station schedulers dynamically react to user workloads and wireless channel conditions. The task of evaluating network algorithms in these environments is hamstrung by current tools: record-and-replay emulators sever the feedback interaction that exists between application end points and a commercial operator's proprietary 5G scheduler, while full-stack simulators rely on overly simplistic scheduling logic. To bridge this reality gap, we present NeuralEmu, a high-fidelity, machine learning-based emulation framework that learns complex 5G scheduler resource allocation behaviors directly from extremely high-resolution network telemetry tools. The first emulator to handle multiple clients, NeuralEmu utilizes machine learning to dynamically predict resource block allocations and modulation schemes based on instantaneous user buffer occupancy and channel states. To capture realistic cross-user contention, a traffic reconstruction model inverts cellular network scheduling results to recover the underlying traffic patterns of uncontrolled background users. Implemented as an high-performance Linux middlebox emulator, NeuralEmu reduces emulation error relative to the state of the art for various network applications including but not limited to 55% for web-page load time, 57% for WebRTC encoder bit rate, and 51% for cloud gaming packet one-way delay, providing an accurate, standardized testing ground for tomorrow's real-time interactive network protocols and applications.

cs.NI

A fully parallel densely connected probabilistic Ising machine with inertia for real-time applications

Ising machines -- special-purpose hardware for heuristically solving Ising optimization problems -- based on probabilistic bits (p-bits) have been established as a promising alternative to heuristic optimization algorithms run on conventional computers. However, it has -- until now -- been thought that Ising spins that are connected in probabilistic Ising machines cannot be updated in parallel without ruining the machine's solving ability. This has been a major challenge for using probabilistic Ising machines as fast solvers for densely connected problems. Here, we circumvent this by introducing a modified Ising spin dynamics with an added inertia term, and verify in algorithm simulations, FPGA hardware emulation, and FPGA experiments that it enables fully parallel, synchronous updates while improving rather than degrading success probability. We evaluated on various types of abstract (Max-Cut and Sherrington-Kirkpatrick-model) and application-derived (MIMO, wireless detection) dense Ising benchmark instances. Performing fully parallel updates results in a speed advantage that grows faster than linearly with the number of spins, giving rise to large time-to-solution increases for practical problem sizes. For both Max-Cut and the SK-1 model at a problem size of 200, our approach achieved an average speedup of $\approx 35\times$, with the best single-instance speedup reaching $150\times$. As an example of the practical utility of our approach in an application where speed is critical, we further show by co-designing the algorithm dynamics with the hardware implementation -- co-optimizing for solver ability and silicon resource usage -- that probabilistic Ising machines based on our approach satisfy the stringent solution quality and latency/throughput requirements for real-time MIMO detection in modern 5G cellular wireless networks while using a practically reasonable silicon area.

cs.ET

Taming Vision Priors for Data Efficient mmWave Channel Modeling

Accurately modeling millimeter-wave (mmWave) propagation is essential for real-time AR and autonomous systems. Differentiable ray tracing offers a physics-grounded solution but still facing deployment challenges due to its over-reliance on exhaustive channel measurements or brittle, hand-tuned scene models for material properties. We present VisRFTwin, a scalable and data-efficient digital-twin framework that integrates vision-derived material priors with differentiable ray tracing. Multi-view images from commodity cameras are processed by a frozen Vision-Language Model to extract dense semantic embeddings, which are translated into initial estimates of permittivity and conductivity for scene surfaces. These priors initialize a Sionna-based differentiable ray tracer, which rapidly calibrates material parameters via gradient descent with only a few dozen sparse channel soundings. Once calibrated, the association between vision features and material parameters is retained, enabling fast transfer to new scenarios without repeated calibration. Evaluations across three real-world scenarios, including office interiors, urban canyons, and dynamic public spaces show that VisRFTwin reduces channel measurement needs by up to 10$\times$ while achieving a 59% lower median delay spread error than pure data-driven deep learning methods.

cs.CV

L4Span: Spanning Congestion Signaling over NextG Networks for Interactive Applications

Design for low latency networking is essential for tomorrow's interactive applications, but it is essential to deploy incrementally and universally at the network's last mile. While wired broadband ISPs are rolling out the leading queue occupancy signaling mechanisms, the cellular Radio Access Network (RAN), another important last mile to many users, lags behind these efforts. This paper proposes a new RAN design, L4Span, that abstracts the complexities of RAN queueing in a simple interface, thus tying the queue state of the RAN to end-to-end low-latency signaling all the way back to the content server. At millisecond-level timescales, L4Span predicts the RAN's queuing occupancy and performs ECN marking for both low-latency and classic flows. L4Span is lightweight, requiring minimal RAN modifications, and remains 3GPP and O-RAN compliant for maximum ease of deployment. We implement a prototype on the srsRAN open-source software in C++. Our evaluation compares the performance of low-latency as well as classic flows with or without the deployment of L4Span in various wireless channel conditions. Results show that L4Span reduces the one-way delay of both low-latency and classic flows by up to 98 %, while simultaneously maintaining near line-rate throughput. The code is available at https://github.com/PrincetonUniversity/L4Span.

cs.NI

MMGaP: Multi-User MIMO Detection and Precoding using GPU-assisted Physics-inspired Computation

Physics-inspired and quantum compute based methods for processing in the physical layer of next-generation cellular radio access networks have demonstrated theoretical advances in spectral efficiency in recent years, but have stopped short of practical realization on commodity processors, leaving a gap between the throughput practical systems can achieve and the projected throughput the state-of-the-art should achieve. To fill this gap, this paper proposes MMGaP, an uplink multi-user MIMO detector and downlink Vector perturbation precoder for next-generation cellular networks. MMGaP realizes these large MIMO processing algorithms for the first time on bare-metal CUDA kernels that scale to run on large GPU processing platforms, and can be packaged as TensorFlow modules, allowing easy integration with a variety of systems. We integrate MMGaP with NVIDIA's software-defined, GPU-accelerated 5G platform and evaluate its performance against the state-of-the-art. In a 5G cellular network using 100 MHz of radio bandwidth, eight antennas at the base station and eight concurrent users, we show that MMGaP improves uplink throughput by approximately 50 Mbps per user and downlink throughput by 100 Mbps per user over a wide range of SNR. We further show that MMGaP can also support larger MIMO sizes: for 16 antennas at the base station and 16 concurrent users, MMGaP provides more than 50 Mbps higher uplink throughput per user. We measure the execution time of MMGaP on different NVIDIA GPUs and show that it can operate at line-rate and meet the timing requirements of state-of-the-art 5G systems.

cs.NI

Seeing Through the Fog: Empowering Mobile Devices to Expose and Mitigate RAN Buffer Effects on Delay-Sensitive Protocols

Delay-based protocols rely on end-to-end delay measurements to detect network congestion. However, in cellular networks, Radio Access Network (RAN) buffers introduce significant delays unrelated to congestion, fundamentally challenging these protocols' assumptions. We identify two major types of RAN buffers - retransmission buffers and uplink scheduling buffers - that can introduce delays comparable to congestion-induced delays, severely degrading protocol performance. We present CellNinjia, a software-based system providing real-time visibility into RAN operations, and Gandalf, which leverages this visibility to systematically handle RAN-induced delays. Unlike existing approaches that treat these delays as random noise, Gandalf identifies specific RAN operations and compensates for their effects. Our evaluation in commercial 4G LTE and 5G networks shows that Gandalf enables substantial performance improvements - up to 7.49x for Copa and 9.53x for PCC Vivace - without modifying the protocols' core algorithms, demonstrating that delay-based protocols can realize their full potential in cellular networks.

cs.NI

Automated, Cross-Layer Root Cause Analysis of 5G Video-Conferencing Quality Degradation

5G wireless networks are complex, leveraging layers of scheduling, retransmission, and adaptation mechanisms to maximize their efficiency. But these mechanisms interact to produce significant fluctuations in uplink and downlink capacity and latency. This markedly impacts the performance of real-time applications, such as video-conferencing, which are particularly sensitive to such fluctuations, resulting in lag, stuttering, distorted audio, and low video quality. This paper presents a cross-layer view of 5G networks and their impact on and interaction with video-conferencing applications. We conduct novel, detailed measurements of both Private CBRS and commercial carrier cellular network dynamics, capturing physical- and link-layer events and correlating them with their effects at the network and transport layers, and the video-conferencing application itself. Our two datasets comprise days of low-rate campus-wide Zoom telemetry data, and hours of high-rate, correlated WebRTC-network-5G telemetry data. Based on these data, we trace performance anomalies back to root causes, identifying 24 previously unknown causal event chains that degrade 5G video conferencing. Armed with this knowledge, we build Domino, a tool that automates this process and is user-extensible to future wireless networks and interactive applications.

cs.NI

Legilimens: Performant Video Analytics on the System-on-Chip Edge

Continually retraining models has emerged as a primary technique to enable high-accuracy video analytics on edge devices. Yet, existing systems employ such adaptation by relying on the spare compute resources that traditional (memory-constrained) edge servers afford. In contrast, mobile edge devices such as drones and dashcams offer a fundamentally different resource profile: weak(er) compute with abundant unified memory pools. We present Legilimens, a continuous learning system for the mobile edge's System-on-Chip GPUs. Our driving insight is that visually distinct scenes that require retraining exhibit substantial overlap in model embeddings; if captured into a base model on device memory, specializing to each new scene can become lightweight, requiring very few samples. To practically realize this approach, Legilimens presents new, compute-efficient techniques to (1) select high-utility data samples for retraining specialized models, (2) update the base model without complete retraining, and (3) time-share compute resources between retraining and live inference for maximal accuracy. Across diverse workloads, Legilimens lowers retraining costs by 2.8-10x compared to existing systems, resulting in 18-45% higher accuracies.

cs.CV

Evolving Mobile Cloud Gaming with 5G Standalone Network Telemetry

Mobile cloud gaming places the simultaneous demands of high capacity and low latency on the wireless network, demands that Private and Metropolitan-Area Standalone 5G networks are poised to meet. However, lacking introspection into the 5G Radio Access Network (RAN), cloud gaming servers are ill-poised to cope with the vagaries of the wireless last hop to a mobile client, while 5G network operators run mostly closed networks, limiting their potential for co-design with the wider internet and user applications. This paper presents Telesa, a passive, incrementally-deployable, and independently-deployable Standalone 5G network telemetry system that streams fine-grained RAN capacity, latency, and retransmission information to application servers to enable better millisecond scale, application-level decisions on offered load and bit rate adaptation than end-to-end latency measurements or end-to-end packet losses currently permit. We design, implement, and evaluate a Telesa telemetry-enhanced game streaming platform, demonstrating exact congestion-control that can better adapt game video bitrate while simultaneously controlling end-to-end latency, thus maximizing game quality of experience. Our experimental evaluation on a production 5G Standalone network demonstrates a 178-249% Quality of Experience improvement versus two state-of-the-art cloud gaming applications.

cs.NI

Ising Machines' Dynamics and Regularization for Near-Optimal Large and Massive MIMO Detection

Optimal MIMO detection has been one of the most challenging and computationally inefficient tasks in wireless systems. We show that the new analog computing techniques like Coherent Ising Machines (CIM) are promising candidates for performing near-optimal MIMO detection. We propose a novel regularized Ising formulation for MIMO detection that mitigates a common error floor problem and further evolves it into an algorithm that achieves near-optimal MIMO detection. Massive MIMO systems, that have a large number of antennas at the Access point (AP), allow linear detectors to be near-optimal. However, the simplified detection in these systems comes at the cost of overall throughput, which could be improved by supporting more users. By means of numerical simulations, we show that in principle a MIMO detector based on a hybrid use of a CIM would allow us to add more transmitter antennas/users and increase the overall throughput of the cell by a significant factor. This would open up the opportunity to operate using more aggressive modulation and coding schemes and hence achieve high throughput: for a $16\times16$ large MIMO system, we estimate around 2.5$\times$ more throughput in mid-SNR regime ($\approx 12 dB$) and 2$\times$ more throughput in high-SNR regime( $>$ 20dB) than the industry standard, Minimum-Mean Square Error decoding (MMSE).

cs.NI

Uplink MIMO Detection using Ising Machines: A Multi-Stage Ising Approach

Multiple-Input-Multiple-Output~(MIMO) signal detection is central to every state-of-the-art communication system, and enhancements in error performance and computation complexity of MIMO detection would significantly enhance data rate and latency experienced by the users. Theoretically, the optimal MIMO detector is the maximum-likelihood (ML) MIMO detector; however, due to its extremely high complexity, it is not feasible for large real-world communication systems. Over the past few years, algorithms based on physics-inspired Ising solvers, like Coherent Ising machines and Quantum Annealers, have shown significant performance improvements for the MIMO detection problem. However, the current state-of-the-art is limited to low-order modulations or systems with few users. In this paper, we propose an adaptive multi-stage Ising machine-based MIMO detector that extends the performance gains of physics-inspired computation to Large and Massive MIMO systems with a large number of users and very high modulation schemes~(up to 256-QAM). We enhance our previously proposed delta Ising formulation and develop a heuristic that adaptively optimizes the performance and complexity of our proposed method. We perform extensive micro-benchmarking to optimize several free parameters of the system and evaluate our methods' BER and spectral efficiency for Large and Massive MIMO systems (up to 32 users and 256 QAM modulation).

cs.NI

A Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm-based Decoder Architecture for NextG Wireless Channel Codes

Forward Error Correction (FEC) provides reliable data flow in wireless networks despite the presence of noise and interference. However, its processing demands significant fraction of a wireless network's resources, due to its computationally-expensive decoding process. This forces network designers to compromise between performance and implementation complexity. In this paper, we investigate a novel processing architecture for FEC decoding, one based on the quantum approximate optimization algorithm (QAOA), to evaluate the potential of this emerging quantum compute approach in resolving the decoding performance-complexity tradeoff. We present FDeQ, a QAOA-based FEC Decoder design targeting the popular NextG wireless Low Density Parity Check (LDPC) and Polar codes. To accelerate QAOA-based decoding towards practical utility, FDeQ exploits temporal similarity among the FEC decoding tasks. This similarity is enabled by the fixed structure of a particular FEC code, which is independent of any time-varying wireless channel noise, ambient interference, and even the payload data. We evaluate FDeQ at a variety of system parameter settings in both ideal (noiseless) and noisy QAOA simulations, and show that FDeQ achieves successful decoding with error performance at par with state-of-the-art classical decoders at low FEC code block lengths. Furthermore, we present a holistic resource estimation analysis, projecting quantitative targets for future quantum devices in terms of the required qubit count and gate duration, for the application of FDeQ in practical wireless networks, highlighting scenarios where FDeQ may outperform state-of-the-art classical FEC decoders.

quant-ph

Wall-Street: An Intelligent Vehicular Surface for Reliable mmWave Handover

mmWave networks promise high bandwidth but face significant challenges in maintaining reliable connections for users moving at high speed. Frequent handovers, complex beam alignment, and signal blockage from car bodies lead to service interruptions and degraded performance. We present Wall-Street, a vehicle-mounted smart surface that enhances mmWave connectivity for in-vehicle users. Wall-Street improves mobility management by (1) steering outdoor mmWave signals into the vehicle for shared coverage and providing a single, collective handover for all users; (2) performing neighbor-cell search without interrupting data transfer, ensuring seamless handovers; and (3) connecting users to a new cell before disconnecting from the old cell for reliable cell transitions. We implemented and integrated Wall-Street into the COSMOS testbed. We collected PHY traces with multiple base station nodes and in-vehicle user nodes with a surface-mounted vehicle, driving on a nearby road. Our trace-driven ns-3 simulation demonstrates a throughput im- provement of up to 78% and a latency reduction of up to 34% over the standard Standalone handover scheme.

cs.NI

Multi Digit Ising Mapping for Low Precision Ising Solvers

The last couple of years have seen an ever-increasing interest in using different Ising solvers, like Quantum annealers, Coherent Ising machines, and Oscillator-based Ising machines, for solving tough computational problems in various domains. Although the simulations predict massive performance improvements for several tough computational problems, the real implementations of the Ising solvers tend to have limited precision, which can cause significant performance deterioration. This paper presents a novel methodology for mapping the problem on the Ising solvers to artificially increase the effective precision. We further evaluate our method for the Multiple-Input-Multiple-Output signal detection problem.

cs.ET

Optimizing Reconfigurable Antenna MIMO Systems with Coherent Ising Machines

Reconfigurable antenna multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) is a promising technology for upcoming 6G communication systems. In this paper, we deal with the problem of configuration selection for reconfigurable antenna MIMO by leveraging Coherent Ising Machines (CIMs). By adopting the CIM as a heuristic solver for the Ising problem, the optimal antenna configuration that maximizes the received signal-to-noise ratio is investigated. A mathematical framework that converts the selection problem into a CIM-compatible unconstrained quadratic formulation is presented. Numerical studies show that the proposed CIM-based design outperforms classical counterparts and achieves near-optimal performance (similar to exponentially complex exhaustive searching) while ensuring polynomial complexity.

cs.IT

X-ResQ: Reverse Annealing for Quantum MIMO Detection with Flexible Parallelism

Quantum Annealing (QA)-accelerated MIMO detection is an emerging research approach in the context of NextG wireless networks. The opportunity is to enable large MIMO systems and thus improve wireless performance. The approach aims to leverage QA to expedite the computation required for theoretically optimal but computationally-demanding Maximum Likelihood detection to overcome the limitations of the currently deployed linear detectors. This paper presents X-ResQ, a QA-based MIMO detector system featuring fine-grained quantum task parallelism that is uniquely enabled by the Reverse Annealing (RA) protocol. Unlike prior designs, X-ResQ has many desirable system properties for a parallel QA detector and has effectively improved detection performance as more qubits are assigned. In our evaluations on a state-of-the-art quantum annealer, fully parallel X-ResQ achieves near-optimal throughput (over 10 bits/s/Hz) for $4\times6$ MIMO with 16-QAM using six levels of parallelism with 240 qubits and $220~μ$s QA compute time, achieving 2.5--5$\times$ gains compared against other tested detectors. For more comprehensive evaluations, we implement and evaluate X-ResQ in the non-quantum digital setting. This non-quantum X-ResQ demonstration showcases the potential to realize ultra-large $1024\times1024$ MIMO, significantly outperforming other MIMO detectors, including the state-of-the-art RA detector classically implemented in the same way.

cs.NI

Physics-Inspired Discrete-Phase Optimization for 3D Beamforming with PIN-Diode Extra-Large Antenna Arrays

Large antenna arrays can steer narrow beams towards a target area, and thus improve the communications capacity of wireless channels and the fidelity of radio sensing. Hardware that is capable of continuously-variable phase shifts is expensive, presenting scaling challenges. PIN diodes that apply only discrete phase shifts are promising and cost-effective; however, unlike continuous phase shifters, finding the best phase configuration across elements is an NP-hard optimization problem. Thus, the complexity of optimization becomes a new bottleneck for large-antenna arrays. To address this challenge, this paper suggests a procedure for converting the optimization objective function from a ratio of quadratic functions to a sequence of more easily solvable quadratic unconstrained binary optimization (QUBO) sub-problems. This conversion is an exact equivalence, and the resulting QUBO forms are standard input formats for various physics-inspired optimization methods. We demonstrate that a simulated annealing approach is very effective for solving these sub-problems, and we give performance metrics for several large array types optimized by this technique. Through numerical experiments, we report 3D beamforming performance for extra-large arrays with up to 10,000 elements.

cs.IT