Papers for

streaming platform engineers

Papers whose findings have a practical use for this group, as judged from the abstract. Open a paper to read what it means in practice.

Scheduling method improves decoding speed for multiple coded message streams

Message-Level Scheduling for RLNC-Coded Multi-Source Traffic

Abstract: This paper studies weighted decoding-delay minimization for multiple RLNC-coded message streams that compete for finite processing capacity at a destination. Packet arrivals are exogenous, while the scheduler only determines the processing order of packets already available at the destination. A trace-conditioned offline scheduling formulation shows that a batch-release subclass is strongly NP-hard even with a single processing unit. Message-Aware Innovation-Deficit Scheduling (MAIDS) is then developed to prioritize each serviceable message according to its weight and remaining decoding deficit. For a single processing unit, MAIDS is shown to be exactly optimal under nonblocking progressive arrivals with equal weights and under common activation with arbitrary positive weights, while the unrestricted weighted online problem admits no universal deterministic $O(1)$ competitive ratio. Simulation results on streaming and batch benchmarks show that MAIDS consistently reduces weighted decoding delay relative to the tested baselines, remains close to the offline optimum on average, and recovers the predicted exact performance boundaries.

Thu 10 SeptNetworking and Internet Architecture
The gist
When several streams of coded messages arrive at a destination to be processed, deciding which message to handle first can reduce delays. The authors study how to schedule these messages to minimize the weighted decoding delay, meaning more important messages get decoded faster. They show that finding the absolute best schedule is very hard, but their proposed method called MAIDS prioritizes messages efficiently based on their remaining work and importance. Simulations demonstrate MAIDS consistently lowers delays compared to other approaches and reaches near-optimal performance in many cases.
Open 2609.10940v1