Christos D. Antonopoulos

Giorgos Polychronis, Foivos Pournaropoulos, Christos D. Antonopoulos et al.

Drones are becoming indispensable in many application domains. In data-driven missions, besides sensing, the drone must process the collected data at runtime to decide whether additional action must be taken on the spot, before moving to the next point of interest. If processing does not reveal an event or situation that requires such an action, the drone has waited in vain instead of moving to the next point. If, however, the drone starts moving to the next point and it turns out that a follow-up action is needed at the previous point, it must spend time to fly-back. To take this decision, we propose different machine-learning methods based on branch prediction and reinforcement learning. We evaluate these methods for a wide range of scenarios where the probability of event occurrence changes with time. Our results show that the proposed methods consistently outperform the regression-based method proposed in the literature and can significantly improve the worst-case mission time by up to 4.1x. Also, the achieved median mission time is very close, merely up to 2.7% higher, to that of a method with perfect knowledge of the current underlying event probability at each point of interest.

Bowen Sun, Christos D. Antonopoulos, Evgenia Smirni et al.

Serverless computing simplifies cloud deployment but introduces new challenges in managing service latency and carbon emissions. Reducing cold-start latency requires retaining warm function instances, while minimizing carbon emissions favors reclaiming idle resources. This balance is further complicated by time-varying grid carbon intensity and varying workload patterns, under which static keep-alive policies are inefficient. We present LACE-RL, a latency-aware and carbon-efficient management framework that formulates serverless pod retention as a sequential decision problem. LACE-RL uses deep reinforcement learning to dynamically tune keep-alive durations, jointly modeling cold-start probability, function-specific latency costs, and real-time carbon intensity. Using the Huawei Public Cloud Trace, we show that LACE-RL reduces cold starts by 51.69% and idle keep-alive carbon emissions by 77.08% compared to Huawei's static policy, while achieving better latency-carbon trade-offs than state-of-the-art heuristic and single-objective baselines, approaching Oracle performance.