arXiv subjects

Mengbang Zou

Publications and source records attributed to Mengbang Zou.

13 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2025

Guaranteeing and Explaining Stability across Heterogeneous Load Balancing using Calculus Network Dynamics

Load balancing between base stations (BSs) allows BS capacity to be efficiently utilised and avoid outages. Currently, data-driven mechanisms strive to balance inter-BS load and reduce unnecessary handovers. The challenge is that over a large number of BSs, networks observe an oscillatory effect of load evolution that causes high inter-BS messaging. Without a calculus function that integrates network topology to describe the evolution of load states, current data-driven algorithms cannot explain the oscillation phenomenon observed in load states, nor can they provide theoretical guarantees on the stability of the ideal synchronised state. Whilst we know load state oscillation is coupled with the load balancing process algorithms and the topology structure of inter-BS boundary relations, we do not have a theoretical framework to prove this and a pathway to improving load balancing algorithms. Here, we abstract generic and heterogeneous data-driven algorithms into a calculus dynamics space, so that we can establish the synchronization conditions for networked load balancing dynamics with any network topology. By incorporating what is known as "non-conservative error" and the eigenvalue spectrum of the networked dynamics, we can adjust the inter-BS load balancing mechanisms to achieve high efficiency and convergence guarantee, or to mitigate the oscillation when the synchronisation condition cannot be satisfied.

eess.SY↗

arXiv2025

KP-A: A Unified Network Knowledge Plane for Catalyzing Agentic Network Intelligence

The emergence of large language models (LLMs) and agentic systems is enabling autonomous 6G networks with advanced intelligence, including self-configuration, self-optimization, and self-healing. However, the current implementation of individual intelligence tasks necessitates isolated knowledge retrieval pipelines, resulting in redundant data flows and inconsistent interpretations. Inspired by the service model unification effort in Open-RAN (to support interoperability and vendor diversity), we propose KP-A: a unified Network Knowledge Plane specifically designed for Agentic network intelligence. By decoupling network knowledge acquisition and management from intelligence logic, KP-A streamlines development and reduces maintenance complexity for intelligence engineers. By offering an intuitive and consistent knowledge interface, KP-A also enhances interoperability for the network intelligence agents. We demonstrate KP-A in two representative intelligence tasks: live network knowledge Q&A and edge AI service orchestration. All implementation artifacts have been open-sourced to support reproducibility and future standardization efforts.

cs.NI↗

arXiv2025

Building AI Service Repositories for On-Demand Service Orchestration in 6G AI-RAN

Efficient orchestration of AI services in 6G AI-RAN requires well-structured, ready-to-deploy AI service repositories combined with orchestration methods adaptive to diverse runtime contexts across radio access, edge, and cloud layers. Current literature lacks comprehensive frameworks for constructing such repositories and generally overlooks key practical orchestration factors. This paper systematically identifies and categorizes critical attributes influencing AI service orchestration in 6G networks and introduces an open-source, LLM-assisted toolchain that automates service packaging, deployment, and runtime profiling. We validate the proposed toolchain through the Cranfield AI Service repository case study, demonstrating significant automation benefits, reduced manual coding efforts, and the necessity of infrastructure-specific profiling, paving the way for more practical orchestration frameworks.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2025

Data-driven Method to Ensure Cascade Stability of Traffic Load Balancing in O-RAN Based Networks

Load balancing in open radio access networks (O-RAN) is critical for ensuring efficient resource utilization, and the user's experience by evenly distributing network traffic load. Current research mainly focuses on designing load-balancing algorithms to allocate resources while overlooking the cascade stability of load balancing, which is critical to prevent endless handover. The main challenge to analyse the cascade stability lies in the difficulty of establishing an accurate mathematical model to describe the process of load balancing due to its nonlinearity and high-dimensionality. In our previous theoretical work, a simplified general dynamic function was used to analyze the stability. However, it is elusive whether this function is close to the reality of the load balance process. To solve this problem, 1) a data-driven method is proposed to identify the dynamic model of the load balancing process according to the real-time traffic load data collected from the radio units (RUs); 2) the stability condition of load balancing process is established for the identified dynamics model. Based on the identified dynamics model and the stability condition, the RAN Intelligent Controller (RIC) can control RUs to achieve a desired load-balancing state while ensuring cascade stability.

eess.SY↗

arXiv2025

Integrated Sensing, Communication, and Over-The-Air Control of UAV Swarm Dynamics

Coordinated controlling a large UAV swarm requires significant spectrum resources due to the need for bandwidth allocation per UAV, posing a challenge in resource-limited environments. Over-the-air (OTA) control has emerged as a spectrum-efficient approach, leveraging electromagnetic superposition to form control signals at a base station (BS). However, existing OTA controllers lack sufficient optimization variables to meet UAV swarm control objectives and fail to integrate control with other BS functions like sensing. This work proposes an integrated sensing and OTA control framework (ISAC-OTA) for UAV swarm. The BS performs OTA signal construction (uplink) and dispatch (downlink) while simultaneously sensing objects. Two uplink post-processing methods are developed: a control-centric approach generating closed-form control signals via a feedback-looped OTA control problem, and a sensing-centric method mitigating transmission-induced interference for accurate object sensing. For the downlink, a non-convex problem is formulated and solved to minimize control signal dispatch (transmission) error while maintaining a minimum sensing signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). Simulation results show that the proposed ISAC-OTA controller achieves control performance comparable to the benchmark optimal control algorithm while maintaining high sensing accuracy, despite OTA transmission interference. Moreover, it eliminates the need for per-UAV bandwidth allocation, showcasing a spectrum-efficient method for cooperative control in future wireless systems.

eess.SP↗

arXiv2024

Modelling Networked Dynamical System by Temporal Graph Neural ODE with Irregularly Partial Observed Time-series Data

Modeling the evolution of system with time-series data is a challenging and critical task in a wide range of fields, especially when the time-series data is regularly sampled and partially observable. Some methods have been proposed to estimate the hidden dynamics between intervals like Neural ODE or Exponential decay dynamic function and combine with RNN to estimate the evolution. However, it is difficult for these methods to capture the spatial and temporal dependencies existing within graph-structured time-series data and take full advantage of the available relational information to impute missing data and predict the future states. Besides, traditional RNN-based methods leverage shared RNN cell to update the hidden state which does not capture the impact of various intervals and missing state information on the reliability of estimating the hidden state. To solve this problem, in this paper, we propose a method embedding Graph Neural ODE with reliability and time-aware mechanism which can capture the spatial and temporal dependencies in irregularly sampled and partially observable time-series data to reconstruct the dynamics. Also, a loss function is designed considering the reliability of the augment data from the above proposed method to make further prediction. The proposed method has been validated in experiments of different networked dynamical systems.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2024

Cascade Network Stability of Synchronized Traffic Load Balancing with Heterogeneous Energy Efficiency Policies

Cascade stability of load balancing is critical for ensuring high efficiency service delivery and preventing undesirable handovers. In energy efficient networks that employ diverse sleep mode operations, handing over traffic to neighbouring cells' expanded coverage must be done with minimal side effects. Current research is largely concerned with designing distributed and centralized efficient load balancing policies that are locally stable. There is a major research gap in identifying large-scale cascade stability for networks with heterogeneous load balancing policies arising from diverse plug-and-play sleep mode policies in ORAN, which will cause heterogeneity in the network stability behaviour. Here, we investigate whether cells arbitrarily connected for load balancing and having an arbitrary number undergoing sleep mode can: (i) synchronize to a desirable load-balancing state, and (ii) maintain stability. For the first time, we establish the criterion for stability and prove its validity for any general load dynamics and random network topology. Whilst its general form allows all load balancing and sleep mode dynamics to be incorporated, we propose an ORAN architecture where the network service management and orchestration (SMO) must monitor new load balancing policies to ensure overall network cascade stability.

eess.SY↗

arXiv2024

Minimize Control Inputs for Strong Structural Controllability Using Reinforcement Learning with Graph Neural Network

Strong structural controllability (SSC) guarantees networked system with linear-invariant dynamics controllable for all numerical realizations of parameters. Current research has established algebraic and graph-theoretic conditions of SSC for zero/nonzero or zero/nonzero/arbitrary structure. One relevant practical problem is how to fully control the system with the minimal number of input signals and identify which nodes must be imposed signals. Previous work shows that this optimization problem is NP-hard and it is difficult to find the solution. To solve this problem, we formulate the graph coloring process as a Markov decision process (MDP) according to the graph-theoretical condition of SSC for both zero/nonzero and zero/nonzero/arbitrary structure. We use Actor-critic method with Directed graph neural network which represents the color information of graph to optimize MDP. Our method is validated in a social influence network with real data and different complex network models. We find that the number of input nodes is determined by the average degree of the network and the input nodes tend to select nodes with low in-degree and avoid high-degree nodes.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2023

How to Find Opinion Leader on the Online Social Network?

Online social networks (OSNs) provide a platform for individuals to share information, exchange ideas, and build social connections beyond in-person interactions. For a specific topic or community, opinion leaders are individuals who have a significant influence on others' opinions. Detecting opinion leaders and modeling influence dynamics is crucial as they play a vital role in shaping public opinion and driving conversations. Existing research have extensively explored various graph-based and psychology-based methods for detecting opinion leaders, but there is a lack of cross-disciplinary consensus between definitions and methods. For example, node centrality in graph theory does not necessarily align with the opinion leader concepts in social psychology. This review paper aims to address this multi-disciplinary research area by introducing and connecting the diverse methodologies for identifying influential nodes. The key novelty is to review connections and cross-compare different multi-disciplinary approaches that have origins in: social theory, graph theory, compressed sensing theory, and control theory. Our first contribution is to develop cross-disciplinary discussion on how they tell a different tale of networked influence. Our second contribution is to propose trans-disciplinary research method on embedding socio-physical influence models into graph signal analysis. We showcase inter- and trans-disciplinary methods through a Twitter case study to compare their performance and elucidate the research progression with relation to psychology theory. We hope the comparative analysis can inspire further research in this cross-disciplinary area.

cs.SI↗

arXiv2021

Local assortativity affects the synchronizability of scale-free network

Synchronization is critical for system level behaviour in physical, chemical, biological and social systems. Empirical evidence has shown that the network topology strongly impacts the synchronizablity of the system, and the analysis of their relationship remains an open challenge. We know that the eigenvalue distribution determines a network's synchronizability, but analytical expressions that connect network topology and all relevant eigenvalues (e.g., the extreme values) remain elusive. Here, we accurately determine its synchronizability by proposing an analytical method to estimate the extreme eigenvalues using perturbation theory. Our analytical method exposes the role global and local topology combine to influence synchronizability. We show that the smallest non-zero eigenvalue which determines synchronizability is estimated by the smallest degree augmented by the inverse degree difference in the least connected nodes. From this, we can conclude that there exists a clear negative relationship between the smallest non-zero eigenvalue and the local assortativity of nodes with smallest degree values. We validate the accuracy of our framework within the setting of a Scale-free (SF) network and can be driven by commonly used ODEs (e.g., 3-dimensional Rosler or Lorenz dynamics). From the results, we demonstrate that the synchronizability of the network can be tuned by rewiring the connections of these particular nodes while maintaining the general degree profile of the network.

cs.SI↗

arXiv2021

Regions of Attraction Estimation using Level SetMethod for Complex Network System

Many complex engineering systems network together functional elements and balance demand loads (e.g.information on data networks, electric power on grids). This allows load spikes to be shifted and avoid a local overload. In mobile wireless networks, base stations(BSs) receive data demand and shift high loads to neighbouring BSs to avoid the outage. The stability of cascade load balancing is important because unstable networks can cause high inefficiency. The research challenge is to prove the stability conditions for any arbitrarily large, complex, and dynamic network topology, and for any balancing dynamic function. Our previous work has proven the conditions for stability for stationary networks near equilibrium for any load balancing dynamic and topology. Most current analyses in dynamic complex networks linearize the system around the fixed equilibrium solutions. This approach is insufficient for dynamic networks with changing equilibrium and estimating the Region of Attraction(ROA) is needed. The novelty of this paper is that we compress this high-dimensional system and use Level Set Methods (LSM) to estimate the ROA. Our results show how we can control the ROA via network topology (local degree control) as a way to configure the mobility of transceivers to ensure the preservation of stable load balancing.

cs.SI↗

arXiv2020

Uncertainty Quantification of Multi-Scale Resilience in Nonlinear Complex Networks using Arbitrary Polynomial Chaos

Resilience characterizes a system's ability to retain its original function when perturbations happen. In the past years our attention mainly focused on small-scale resilience, yet our understanding of resilience in large-scale network considering interactions between components is limited. Even though, recent research in macro and micro resilience pattern has developed analytical tools to analyze the relationship between topology and dynamics across network scales. The effect of uncertainty in a large-scale networked system is not clear, especially when uncertainties cascade between connected nodes. In order to quantify resilience uncertainty across the network resolutions (macro to micro),an arbitrary polynomial chaos (aPC) expansion method is developed in this paper to estimate the resilience subject to parameter uncertainties with arbitrary distributions. For the first time and of particular importance, is our ability to identify the probability of a node in losing its resilience and how the different model parameters contribute to this risk. We test this using a generic networked bi-stable system and this will aid practitioners to both understand macro-scale behaviour and make micro-scale interventions.

nlin.AO↗

arXiv2020

Uncertainty of Resilience in Complex Networks with Nonlinear Dynamics

Resilience is a system's ability to maintain its function when perturbations and errors occur. Whilst we understand low-dimensional networked systems' behavior well, our understanding of systems consisting of a large number of components is limited. Recent research in predicting the network level resilience pattern has advanced our understanding of the coupling relationship between global network topology and local nonlinear component dynamics. However, when there is uncertainty in the model parameters, our understanding of how this translates to uncertainty in resilience is unclear for a large-scale networked system. Here we develop a polynomial chaos expansion method to estimate the resilience for a wide range of uncertainty distributions. By applying this method to case studies, we not only reveal the general resilience distribution with respect to the topology and dynamics sub-models, but also identify critical aspects to inform better monitoring to reduce uncertainty.

eess.SY↗