Snigdha Das

Debarpita Banerjee, Sumana Ghosh, Snigdha Das et al.

Network slicing is a modern 5G technology that provides efficient network experience for diverse use cases. It is a technique for partitioning a single physical network infrastructure into multiple virtual networks, called slices, each equipped for specific services and requirements. In this work, we particularly deal with radio access network (RAN) slicing and resource allocation to RAN slices. In 5G, physical resource blocks (PRBs) being the fundamental units of radio resources, our main focus is to allocate PRBs to the slices efficiently. While addressing a spectrum of needs for multiple services or the same services with multi-priorities, we need to ensure two vital system properties: i) fairness to every service type (i.e., providing the required resources and a desired range of throughput) even after prioritizing a particular service type, and ii) PRB-optimality or minimizing the unused PRBs in slices. These serve as the core performance evaluation metrics for PRB-allocation in our work. We adopt the 3-layered hierarchical PRB-partitioning technique for allocating PRBs to network slices. The case-specific, AI-based solution of the state-of-the-art method lacks sufficient correctness to ensure consistent system performance. To achieve guaranteed correctness and completeness, we leverage formal methods and propose the first approach for a fair and optimal PRB distribution to RAN slices. We formally model the PRB-allocation problem as a 3-layered framework, FORSLICE, specifically by employing satisfiability modulo theories. Next, we apply formal verification to ensure that the desired system properties: fairness and PRB-optimality, are satisfied by the model. The proposed method offers an efficient, versatile and automated approach compatible with all 3-layered hierarchical network structure configurations, yielding significant system property improvements compared to the baseline.

Snigdha Das, Soumyajit Chatterjee, Sandip Chakraborty et al.

In an organization, individuals prefer to form various formal and informal groups for mutual interactions. Therefore, ubiquitous identification of such groups and understanding their dynamics are important to monitor activities, behaviours and well-being of the individuals. In this paper, we develop a lightweight, yet near-accurate, methodology, called MeetSense, to identify various interacting groups based on collective sensing through users' smartphones. Group detection from sensor signals is not straightforward because users in proximity may not always be under the same group. Therefore, we use acoustic context extracted from audio signals to infer interaction pattern among the subjects in proximity. We have developed an unsupervised and lightweight mechanism for user group detection by taking cues from network science and measuring the cohesivity of the detected groups in terms of modularity. Taking modularity into consideration, MeetSense can efficiently eliminate incorrect groups, as well as adapt the mechanism depending on the role played by the proximity and the acoustic context in a specific scenario. The proposed method has been implemented and tested under many real-life scenarios in an academic institute environment, and we observe that MeetSense can identify user groups with close to 90% accuracy even in a noisy environment.