Optimal Energy Consumption for Communication, Computation, Caching and Quality Guarantee

Abstract Energy efficiency is a fundamental requirement of modern data communication systems, and its importance is reflected in much recent work on performance analysis of system energy consumption. However, most work has only focused on communication and computation costs without accounting for data caching costs. Given the increasing interest in cache networks, this is a serious deficiency. In this paper, we consider the problem of energy consumption in data communication, compression and caching (C3) with a quality-of-information (QoI) guarantee in a communication network. Our goal is to identify the optimal data compression rates and cache placement over the network that minimizes the overall energy consumption in the network. We formulate the problem as a Mixed Integer Non-Linear Programming (MINLP) problem with non-convex functions, which is NP-hard in general. We propose a variant of the spatial branch and bound algorithm (V-SBB) that can provide an -global optimal solution to the problem. By extensive numerical experiments, we show that the C3 optimization framework improves the energy efficiency by up to 88% compared to any optimization that only considers either communication and caching or communication and computation. Furthermore, the V-SBB technique provides comparatively better solution than some other MINLP solvers at the cost of added computation time.
Authors
  • Faheem Zafari (Imperial)
  • Jian Li (UMass)
  • Kin Leung (Imperial)
  • Don Towsley (UMass)
  • Ananthram Swami (ARL)
Date Apr-2019
Venue IEEE Transactions on Control of Network Systems [link]