Speaker: Xingwei Wang, Northeastern University, China

Title: Towards Fine-gained Services: NFV-assisted Tracking and Positioning using Micro-services for Internet of Robots

Abstract:

Robotics as a Service (RaaS) emerges as a new paradigm to motivate diversified potential of the “remotecontrolled economy” for flexible and efficient service provision with the help of cloud computing. The Multi-robot Cooperation (MRC) technology has been widely used in various intelligent logistics scenarios, such as warehouses, factories, airports and subway stations, benefiting from the advantages of high operational efficiency and low labor cost. While promising, the corresponding challenge is that the service functions deployed on Logistics Robots (LRs) are more prone to failures such as resource exhaustion and error configuration in the Multi-robot System (MRS). In this way, it becomes extremely important to discover and locate abnormal services as soon as possible so as to reduce or even avoid economic loss. Since the benefits of MRS can be achieved by massive generation of service functions that are decoupled from the hardware and deployed on-demand, this paper aims at proposing a Network Function Virtualization (NFV) based complete service chain tracking and positioning process with a more fine-grained level of LRs. Specifically, a micro-service-based system framework for high-accurate service tracking and fault function positioning is constructed, in which two main micro-service functions are designed for service chain tracking and positioning to maintain the stability and reliability of the MRS. On one hand, the tracking micro-service proposes an improved Hopcroft-Karp algorithm to determine the optimal probing and tracking path for MRC. On the other hand, the positioning micro-service proposes a delay-aware dichotomy probing algorithm to minimize the number of probe packets. Experimental results indicate that the proposed system framework and mechanisms outperform the state-of-the-art methods in terms of tracking and positioning accuracy in the MRS.

Biographical Sketch:

Xingwei Wang, Vice President of Northeastern University, Professor, Recipient of the National Outstanding Youth Science Fund, China State Council Government Special Allowance Recipients; Member of the National Engineering Professional Degree Graduate Education Guidance Committee; Fellow of China Computer Federation, Fellow of China Institute of Communications; Chairman of CCF Internet Special Committee; Director of Liaoning Key Laboratory of Intelligent Internet Theory and Application. His research areas include Internet, cloud computing and cyberspace security, etc. He has received 2 second prizes for national scientific and technological progress, 1 second prize of national teaching achievement and 8 first prizes at the provincial and ministerial levels.