Yaxiong Xie

Short video streaming applications have recently gained substantial traction, but the non-linear video presentation they afford swiping users fundamentally changes the problem of maximizing user quality of experience in the face of the vagaries of network throughput and user swipe timing. This paper describes the design and implementation of Dashlet, a system tailored for high quality of experience in short video streaming applications. With the insights we glean from an in-the-wild TikTok performance study and a user study focused on swipe patterns, Dashlet proposes a novel out-of-order video chunk pre-buffering mechanism that leverages a simple, non machine learning-based model of users’ swipe statistics to determine the pre-buffering order and bitrate. The net result is a system that outperforms TikTok by 28-101%, while also reducing by 30% the number of bytes wasted on downloaded video that is never watched.

Offloading the beamforming task from the endpoints to the metasurface installed in the propagation environment has attracted significant attention. Currently, most of the metasurface-based beamforming solutions are designed and optimized for operation on a single ISM band (either 2.4 GHz or 5 GHz). In this paper, we propose RF-Bouncer, a compact, low-cost, simple-structure programmable dual-band metasurface that supports concurrent beamforming on two Sub-6 ISM bands. By configuring the states of the meta-atoms, the metasurface is able to simultaneously steer the incident signals from two bands towards their desired departure angles. We fabricate the metasurface and validate its performance via extensive experiments. Experimental results demonstrate that RF-Bouncer achieves 15.4 dB average signal strength improvement and a 2.49× throughput improvement even with a relatively small 16× 16 array of meta-atoms.

Accurate and highly-granular channel capacity telemetry of the cellular last hop is crucial for the effective operation of transport layer protocols and cutting edge applications, such as video on demand and video telephony. This paper presents the design, implementation, and experimental performance evaluation of NG-Scope, the first such telemetry tool able to fuse physical-layer channel occupancy readings from the cellular control channel with higher-layer packet arrival statistics and make accurate capacity estimates. NG-Scope handles the latest cellular innovations, such as when multiple base stations aggregate their signals together to serve mobile users. End-to-end experiments in a commercial cellular network demonstrate that wireless capacity varies significantly with channel quality, mobility, competing traffic within each cell, and the number of aggregated cells. Our experiments demonstrate significantly improved cell load estimation accuracy, missing the detection of less than 1% of data capacity overall, a reduction of 82% compared to OWL, the state-of-the-art in cellular monitoring. Further experiments show that MobileInsight-based CLAW has a root-mean-squared capacity error of 30.5 Mbit/s, which is 3.3× larger than NG-Scope (9.2 Mbit/s).

As the most important organs of sense, human eyes perceive 80% information from our surroundings. Eyeball movement is closely related to our brain health condition. Eyeball movement and eye blink are also widely used as an efficient human-computer interaction scheme for paralyzed individuals to communicate with others. Traditional methods mainly use intrusive EOG sensors or cameras to capture eye activity information. In this work, we propose a system named SmartLens to achieve eye activity sensing using zero-power contact lens. To make it happen, we develop dedicated antenna design which can be fitted in an extremely small space and still work efficiently to reach a working distance more than 1 m. To accurately track eye movements in the presence of strong self-interference, we employ another tag to track the user’s head movement and cancel it out to support sensing a walking or moving user. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed system. At a distance of 1.4 m, the proposed system can achieve an average accuracy of detecting the basic eye movement and blink at 89.63% and 82%, respectively.