Huawei Cloud enters Franz Edelman Award finals

Huawei has been named among the six finalists of the Franz Edelman Award Competition 2023 for its robust cloud resource scheduling technology.

The Franz Edelman Award is presented annually by the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS) to recognize achievements in the management sciences.

Huawei Cloud’s cloud resource scheduling technology provides a solution that increases media network resource utilization by over 30% with its innovative algorithms. The improved quality of service (QoS) has translated into ten-fold live-streaming business growth over the past two years.

Huawei has 39 scientists across 16 research centers both inside and outside of China for research on cloud resource scheduling. Yuan Xiaoming, Chief Scientist of the Huawei Cloud Algorithm Innovation Lab, collaborated with experts in the live streaming field to work on maximizing resource utilization and providing service quality under billing by 95th percentile bandwidth.

There are two difficulties that they encountered during the problem-solving process:

• First – due to the non-convex and non-smooth cost function in the mathematical model, minimizing the cost under billing by 95th percentile bandwidth is NP-hard.
• Second – Huawei Cloud Live involves more than 2,800 edge nodes. This means that there are 120 billion binary and continuous variables in the corresponding mathematical models.

To address these issues, experts built a series of mathematical programming models, which provide a paradigm for further research. Experts also performed an in-depth analysis of the structure and mathematical characteristics of the models.

They split problems into subproblems, for which algorithms that combine easy problem-solving and implementation with high efficiency and stability were developed.

Numerical experiment results show that these algorithms improve media network utilization by more than 30%, and also provide better QoS indicators such as higher stream pull success rate, shorter frame freezing in 100 seconds, and less time needed before playing the first frame.

It also brings other aspects of scheduling to new levels, such as through its industry-leading shortest-path MKSP algorithm and its collaboration with the Huawei Backbone Network (an industry-unique feature) and advanced cloud services. The scheduling-related research has yielded 30 patents and 6 research papers.

We congratulate Huawei Cloud for making place in Franz Edelman Award finals.