MD2G-Cast: Relay-Coordinated Multicast for Scalable Volumetric Streaming over MoQ

Volumetric streaming remains difficult to scale because receivers with overlapping fields of view are often served independently, causing repeated transmission of shared content. We present MD2G-Cast, a relay-coordinated multicast framework over Media over QUIC with an application-aware control layer for scalable multi-user volumetric delivery. MD2G-Cast jointly uses viewing overlap, receiver capability, and bandwidth conditions to form reusable multicast groups, share common Base content, and selectively admit Enhanced delivery. We formulate grouping and Enhanced admission as a sequential control problem, realize it with Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO), and train a compact relay model with teacher guidance for Enhanced admission. We implement MD2G-Cast with real MoQ processes and evaluate it with real access and 6DoF viewing traces for up to 100 users. At 20 and 100 users, MD2G-Cast keeps the receiver-side $P_{99}$ delivery interval below 40 ms across all seven access profiles, while Rolling reaches the 500 ms reporting cap in most cases. Across the evaluated user scales, MD2G-Cast achieves the highest or tied-highest mean system utility under homogeneous access and the highest mean utility under heterogeneous access, while reducing aggregate link load by about 27% relative to Clustering at 100 users. A matched relay-control ablation separates the control structure from its optimizer, showing that random feasible actions reduce utility while deterministic control remains competitive with PPO. Together, the results support relay coordination and selective Enhanced admission, rather than a particular policy optimizer, as the central design contribution.

COMETS: Coordinated Multi-Destination Video Transmission with In-Network Rate Adaptation

Large-scale video streaming events attract millions of simultaneous viewers, stressing existing delivery infrastructures. Client-driven adaptation reacts slowly to shared congestion, while server-based coordination introduces scalability bottlenecks and single points of failure. We present COMETS, a coordinated multi-destination video transmission framework that leverages information-centric networking principles such as request aggregation and in-network state awareness to enable scalable, fair, and adaptive rate control. COMETS introduces a novel range-interest protocol and distributed in-network decision process that aligns video quality across receiver groups while minimizing redundant transmissions. To achieve this, we develop a lightweight distributed optimization framework that guides per-hop quality adaptation without centralized control. Extensive emulation shows that COMETS consistently improves bandwidth utilization, fairness, and user-perceived quality of experience over DASH, MoQ, and ICN baselines, particularly under high concurrency. The results highlight COMETS as a practical, deployable approach for next-generation scalable video delivery.

PacTrain: Pruning and Adaptive Sparse Gradient Compression for Efficient Collective Communication in Distributed Deep Learning

Large-scale deep neural networks (DNN) exhibit excellent performance for various tasks. As DNNs and datasets grow, distributed training becomes extremely time-consuming and demands larger clusters. A main bottleneck is the resulting gradient aggregation overhead. While gradient compression and sparse collective communication techniques are commonly employed to alleviate network load, many gradient compression schemes do not achieve acceleration of the training process while also preserving accuracy. This paper introduces PacTrain, a novel framework that accelerates distributed training by combining pruning with sparse gradient compression. Active pruning of the neural network makes the model weights and gradients sparse. By ensuring the global knowledge of the gradient sparsity among all distributed training workers, we can perform lightweight compression communication without harming accuracy. We show that the PacTrain compression scheme achieves a near-optimal compression strategy while remaining compatible with the all-reduce primitive. Experimental evaluations show that PacTrain improves training throughput by 1.25 to 8.72 times compared to state-of-the-art compression-enabled systems for representative vision and language models training tasks under bandwidth-constrained conditions.

Delay-Tolerant ICN and Its Application to LoRa

Connecting long-range wireless networks to the Internet imposes challenges due to vastly longer round-trip-times (RTTs). In this paper, we present an ICN protocol framework that enables robust and efficient delay-tolerant communication to edge networks. Our approach provides ICN-idiomatic communication between networks with vastly different RTTs. We applied this framework to LoRa, enabling end-to-end consumer-to-LoRa-producer interaction over an ICN-Internet and asynchronous data production in the LoRa edge. Instead of using LoRaWAN, we implemented an IEEE 802.15.4e DSME MAC layer on top of the LoRa PHY and ICN protocol mechanisms in RIOT OS. Executed on off-the-shelf IoT hardware, we provide a comparative evaluation for basic NDN-style ICN [60], RICE [31]-like pulling, and reflexive forwarding [46]. This is the first practical evaluation of ICN over LoRa using a reliable MAC. Our results show that periodic polling in NDN works inefficiently when facing long and differing RTTs. RICE reduces polling overhead and exploits gateway knowledge, without violating ICN principles. Reflexive forwarding reflects sporadic data generation naturally. Combined with a local data push, it operates efficiently and enables lifetimes of >1 year for battery powered LoRa-ICN nodes.