Theses and Dissertations at Montana State University (MSU)
Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://scholarworks.montana.edu/handle/1/733
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Item Enabling real-time communications in resource-constrained networks(Montana State University - Bozeman, College of Engineering, 2023) Mekiker, Batuhan; Co-chairs, Graduate Committee: Clemente Izurieta and Mike WittieThe Internet of Things (IoT) applications require flexible and high-performance data channels, but many IoT networks can only support single-use case applications, which limits their performance and flexibility for real-time and streaming applications. LoRa offers a flexible physical network layer but lacks the resource management needed in its link layer protocols to support real-time flows. My initial contribution, the Beartooth Relay Protocol (BRP), expands the performance envelope of LoRa, making it suitable for a wide range of IoT applications, including those requiring real-time and streaming capabilities, and aims to address the problem. However, the resource-limited nature of LoRa does not allow BRP to scale to multi-hop mesh network deployments while maintaining real-time streams. To address the limitations of BRP in supporting mesh network deployments and real-time streams beyond two hops, we focus on developing the second-generation Beartooth Radios, MKII, and the first-generation Beartooth Gateways. We utilize Commercially-available Of the Shelf Components (COTS) in the radios to provide a cost-effective, power-efficient, and compact solution for establishing real-time situational awareness. The self-healing mesh network provided with MKII and Gateways also enhances the reliability of the overall network, ensuring connectivity even in case of node failures. By incorporating military information brokers, such as the Tactical Assault Kit (TAK), the Beartooth Gateway establishes a hybrid network between Beartooth radios, gateways, and other TAK-capable devices, ensuring compatibility with existing IP networks. Building upon the premise that voice communications are an integral part of real-time SA, the last part of my research focuses on assessing audio quality and efficacy of audio codecs within bandwidth-constrained networks. Delving into voice communications in resource-constrained networks, my research contrasts the performance of Text-to-Speech (TTS) models with traditional audio codecs. I demonstrate that TTS models outperform audio codec compressed voice samples in quality while also effectively managing scarce resources and available capacity more efficiently. By combining flexible link layer protocol elements in BRP, Beartooth MKII radios, Gateways, and insights on integrating TTS systems for voice communication, my research demonstrates a versatile and flexible solution that provides real-time application streams and critical situational awareness capabilities in bandwidth-constrained networks and mission-critical applications.Item Towards responsive user services in edge computing(Montana State University - Bozeman, College of Engineering, 2023) Rahman, Saidur; Co-chairs, Graduate Committee: Mike Wittie and Sean Yaw; This is a manuscript style paper that includes co-authored chapters.Mobile applications can improve battery and application performance by offloading heavy processing tasks to more powerful compute servers. Cloud servers are located far from mobile devices that may not meet the responsiveness requirements of those applications. Edge servers deployed at the edge of the network to provide the compute resources to achieve low latency. So the combination of 5G and edge computing has the potential to offer low latency user services that can make the mobile applications responsive. 5G provides fast communication between users and servers, however, additional communication delays can occur because of increasing number of roundtrip communication to locate the servers using domain name system (DNS). So, I propose a caching mechanism to reduce the DNS roundtrip delay. Furthermore, the edge server and cellular tower use the same compute resources, which are limited. It is not clear how to place the tasks on the limited edge resources and how to handle the resource sharing when Radio Access Network (RAN) process needs more computation resources to handle network traffic fluctuations. So, I present several techniques to implement task checkpointing, task checkpointing overhead prediction, and task migration to provide low latency and responsive services to mobile applications. I also show how the proposed techniques can manage the shared resources between mobile network and edge servers, utilize the available edge resource effectively and increase users' quality of experience.