Marceau Coupechoux, professor at Telecom-ParisTech, and adjunct professor at Ecole Polytechnique – and, thus, in addition to being a good friend, also a good colleague – has conspired with two of his collaborators (A. S. Bedi, K. Rajawat) from IIT Kanpur to produce a paper “An online approach to D2D trajectory utility maximization problem”.
It’s perhaps not that remarkable that a bunch of academics produce a paper – what is remarkable is, however, that it has been accepted at the aspirational conference INFOCOM. Well done, Marceau & team! (Paper #254 on this list).
As it happens, in 2018 this conference is aspirational not just because it’s one of the most selective conferences in its field, but also because … it’s held in Honolulu Hawaii. It starts in precisely 1 month, on the 15th of April – thus, creating a great opportunity for pasty European academics to get a bit of colour before summer 😉
The paper is interesting – and, almost, has a sociological aspect to it: it observes that people have become so addicted to connectivity, that they’re willing to sacrifice other things to stay connected to the on-line game, or social network, du jour. Thus, pedestrian users with mobile devices, connected with each other through a direct (peer-to-peer, bypassing the cellular infrastructure) wireless communications link may be willing to deviate from their intended trajectory so as to maximize the ability to utilise that link for whatever their purpose … while, of course, being able to hand off the connection between them through a cellular infrastructure so as to ensure that each pedestrian user will reach her intended destination without a too significant delay. As Marceau and his colleagues distinctly are not sociologists, they do study this as an optimisation problem, and the paper provides an interesting approach allowing on-line optimal (with respect to the stated criteria) trajectory calculation approach.
While the development and the proofs “do involve math”, Marceau and his colleagues actually manage to strike home the main points in a very accessible and intuitive fashion – well, do have a read for yourself! …