Rebirth: Starting from Lighting Up the Tech Tree

Chapter 83 Technical Breakthrough

As the pilot program entered its second month, problems arose.

One morning, Ma Hao rushed into Zuo Cheng's office, looking rather grim.

"Mr. Zuo, there's a bug in the edge scheduling system." He placed his laptop on the table. "During the morning peak hours, there were intermittent packet losses in the sensor data transmission. The packet loss rate reached as high as three percent. Although it's not serious, it wouldn't look good if it occurred during third-party evaluations."

Zuo Cheng frowned: "What's the reason?"

"I'm not entirely sure yet," Ma Hao said. "Initial investigations suggest it's not a network bandwidth issue, nor is it a bottleneck in the edge gateway's computing power. I suspect the scheduling algorithm is experiencing race conditions under extreme concurrency scenarios, causing some data packets to be dropped."

"Extreme concurrency?"

"During the morning rush hour, traffic flow sensors on three streets simultaneously upload data, and with the periodic reporting from air quality and noise sensors, the instantaneous concurrency is three to four times higher than usual. Although our scheduling algorithm has undergone adaptive optimization, scheduling conflicts still occur under such sudden surges."

Zuo Cheng thought for a while. This is a typical problem in IoT systems: the data reporting from sensor nodes is not uniformly distributed, but rather bursty. Morning rush hour, evening rush hour, weather changes, and sudden events can all cause a sudden surge in data volume. Traditional solutions rely on increasing bandwidth and computing power to cope with this, but 402's solution takes a lightweight approach with limited resources, so it must be solved at the algorithm level.

To make matters worse, the third-party evaluation arranged by Director Zhao is only two weeks away. If packet loss occurs during the evaluation, 402's technical reputation will be damaged. Huaxin is watching closely, and any technical flaw will be magnified.

Do you have any ideas?

"Yes." Ma Hao opened an algorithm model. "I want to add a priority queue to the scheduling algorithm. Different types of sensor data will be assigned different priorities, with traffic flow data having the highest priority, followed by air quality and noise data, and then trash can fill level data having the lowest priority. When a surge in concurrent requests occurs, the transmission of high-priority data will be prioritized, while low-priority data can be reported with a delay."

"How long will the delay be?"

"A maximum of two seconds. A two-second delay in reporting the trash can's fullness will have no impact on the user experience."

Zuo Cheng nodded. This approach is correct; not all IoT data needs to be real-time, and prioritizing it is the most reasonable solution.

"Go do it," Zuo Cheng said. "Apply the patch within three days; I need to see results."

After Ma Hao left, Zuo Cheng opened the system panel. He glanced at the leaves on the branch of the Internet of Things, where the edge computing gateway leaves were faintly glowing, as if responding to his thoughts.

Edge computing gateway

Status: Activated

[Capabilities: Supports multi-priority data scheduling, dynamic resource allocation, and elastic scaling]

Zuo Cheng was taken aback. Multi-priority data scheduling? Isn't this the priority queue that Ma Hao mentioned? It turns out that the leaf on the technology tree itself contained this capability, but he hadn't explored it in depth before.

He carefully reviewed the detailed capability description of the edge computing gateway blade and found that in addition to priority scheduling, it also supports "predictive resource reservation", which means predicting the concurrency of the next period based on historical data and reserving bandwidth and computing power in advance.

If this capability were added, the packet loss problem during the morning rush hour could be completely solved.

Zuo Cheng called Ma Hao back.

"Your priority queue idea is excellent, but I'll add another feature for you," Zuo Cheng said. "We'll add predictive resource reservation to the scheduling algorithm. Based on data patterns from the past few days, we'll predict the peak concurrency in the morning and reserve resources before the peak arrives."

Ma Hao's eyes lit up: "Predictive reservation? That's even smarter. It's like letting the system know in advance that a flood peak is coming, so it can repair the roads beforehand."

"Yes," Zuo Cheng said. "You can use the monitoring data from the past two weeks as a training set to build a simple time series prediction model. You don't need anything too complex like machine learning; linear regression will suffice."

"Understood!" Ma Hao practically ran away.

Three days later, the patch was released.

Ma Hao added two modules, a priority queue and predictive resource reservation, to the scheduling algorithm, and then conducted load tests in an intranet environment. The results were impressive: under extreme concurrency scenarios simulating morning rush hour, the packet loss rate dropped from 3% to zero. The end-to-end latency of high-priority data remained unchanged, while the latency of low-priority data was controlled within 1.5 seconds.

"Perfect." Ma Hao breathed a sigh of relief. "President Zuo, your idea for predictive resource reservation is brilliant. How come I didn't think of that?"

Zuo Cheng smiled. He couldn't tell Ma Hao that this idea came from the leaf ability description in the technology tree.

"Because you don't have time to think," Zuo Cheng said. "You're busy writing code, and I'm busy looking at the big picture. It's just a difference in roles."

The day after the patch went live, it was rush hour. Zuo Cheng and Ma Hao stood together in front of the monitor screen, watching the real-time data.

At 7:30, the number of concurrent requests began to climb.

At 8:15 a.m., the peak arrived. Traffic sensors on the three streets reported data simultaneously, with the amount of data being 4.2 times the usual amount.

On the screen, the packet loss rate curve remained firmly on the zero line without any fluctuation.

"It's a sure thing." Ma Hao clenched his fist. "Zero packet loss during the morning rush hour; this data is 402's biggest trump card."

Zuo Cheng nodded, feeling relieved. But he knew that the technical problems were easy to solve; the real challenge came from Huaxin.

Latest news from Han Lu: Huaxin has submitted a formal smart city plan to the municipal government, and the price has been reduced from 4500 million to 3200 million. Lin Jianhua personally led a team to the municipal government three times, showing a very positive attitude.

A price war has begun.

Zuo Cheng closed his eyes and leaned back in his chair. Huaxin's intention was clear: first, to disrupt the market with low prices, making 402 unprofitable, and then to slowly erode the market using its brand and scale advantages. This was a classic tactic of large enterprises suppressing small enterprises, and Lin Jianhua used it very skillfully.

But Zuocheng isn't afraid of a price war. The 402 solution already has lower costs, and even if Huaxin lowers the price to 3200 million, 402 will still have profit margin. The real key isn't price, but effectiveness. If the pilot data is impressive enough, price won't be the only consideration.

He picked up his phone and sent a message to Yu Ying: "Kongkong, has the joint lab recently released any new findings that can be added to the smart city solution? I need more resources."

Yu Ying replied quickly: "Perfect timing! I just finished developing an algorithm for sensor anomaly detection with 98% accuracy. Want to give it a try?"

"want."

Zuo Cheng put down his phone, a slight smile playing on his lips. His Kong Kong always appeared when he needed him most.