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In this paper, a long-term workload management problem for multi-server edge computing with server collaboration is studied. In the considered model, mobile users computation-intensive tasks are generated dynamically over the time and offloaded to associated edge servers according to pre-determined subscription agreements. Upon receiving the subscribed workload, each edge server can then decide to whether participate in server collaboration for enabling workload re-allocation (i.e., workload exchange) with other heterogeneously configured edge servers. Unlike most of the existing work, this paper takes into account both competitions and collaborations among strategic edge servers in sharing their computing capacities. To achieve the equilibrium for each edge server in minimizing its expected cost (including energy consumption, delay, transmission, configuration and pricing costs), a joint optimization is formulated for determining i) its amount of workload to undertake, ii) compensation price charged from peers, and iii) computing speed to adopt. To efficiently solve this problem, we propose a novel cooperative queueing game approach, which integrates a convex optimization, a core cost sharing scheme and a mapping rule. Theoretical analyses and extensive simulations are conducted to evaluate the performance of the proposed solution, and demonstrate its superiority over counterparts.

Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) has emerged as a promising paradigm catering to overwhelming explosions of mobile applications, by offloading the compute-intensive tasks to an MEC network for processing. The surging of deep learning brings new vigor and vitality to shape the prospect of intelligent Internet of Things (IoT), and edge intelligence arises to provision real-time deep neural network (DNN) inference services for users. In this paper, we study a novel delay-aware DNN inference throughput maximization problem by accelerating each DNN inference through jointly exploring DNN partitioning and multi-thread parallelism. Specifically, we consider the problem under both offline and online request arrival settings: a set of DNN inference requests is given in advance, and a sequence of DNN inference requests arrives one by one without the knowledge of future arrivals, respectively. We first show that the defined problems are NP-hard. We then devise a novel constant approximation algorithm for the problem under the offline setting. We also propose an online algorithm with a provable competitive ratio for the problem under the online setting. We finally evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithms through experimental simulations. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed algorithms are promising.

Multi-access edge computing (MEC) has been recently considered in challenging environments lacking available terrestrial infrastructures by extending the computing resources to the air for further enhancing the computation capability of the new aerial user equipment (AUE). Additionally, wireless power transfer (WPT) is a promising solution to prolong the battery lifetime of energy-constrained wireless devices like AUEs. In this paper, we investigate the integration of laser-beamed WPT in the high-altitude platform (HAP) aided MEC systems for the HAP-connected AUEs. By discretizing the three-dimensional coverage space of the HAP, we present a multi-tier tile grid-based spatial structure to provide aerial locations for laser charging. With this setup, we identify a new privacy vulnerability caused by the openness during the air-to-air transmission of WPT signaling messages in the presence of a terrestrial adversary. A privacy-aware laser-powered aerial MEC framework is developed that addresses this vulnerability and enhances the location privacy of AUEs for laser WPT. Specifically, the interaction between the HAP as a defender and the adversary in their tile grid allocation as charging locations to AUEs is formulated as a Colonel Blotto game, which models the competition of the players for limited resources over multiple battlefields for a finite time horizon. Moreover, we derive the mixed-strategy Nash equilibria of the tile grid allocation game for both symmetric and asymmetric tile grids between the defender and the adversary. Simulations results show that the proposed framework significantly outperforms the design baselines with a given privacy protection level in terms of system-wide expected total utilities.

Edge computing can provide high bandwidth and low-latency service for big data tasks by leveraging the edge side’s computing, storage, and network resources. With the development of microservice and docker technology, service providers can flexibly and dynamically cache microservice at the edge side to respond efficiently with limited resources. Automatically caching needed services on the nearest edge nodes and dynamically scheduling users’ requests can realize that computing power and software services flow with the users to provide continuous services. However, achieving the goal needs to overcome many challenges, such as the significant fluctuation of user devices’ requests at the edge side and the lack of collaboration among edge nodes. In this paper, dynamic computing power scheduling and collaborative task scheduling among edge nodes are comprehensively developed. The problem is considered a multi-objective optimization problem, including sequentially minimizing the deadline missing rate of requests and the average task completion time. We propose an adaptive mechanism for dynamically collaborative computing power and task scheduling (ADCS) in the edge environment to solve this problem. It adopts the greedy decision method to schedule computing tasks to meet their deadline requirements. At the same time, it uses the best-fit method to adjust the computing resources according to the changes of users’ requests. The simulation results show that ADCS can decrease the deadline missing rate and reduce the average completion time. Compared with DSR and CoDSR, the deadline missing rate is reduced by 59.91% and 19.95%, respectively. The average completion time is decreased by 37.87%, 6.71%.

With the rapid advance of Internet of Things (IoTs), it is difficult for cloud-centric computing to meet the requirements of low latency and ease of use. As an open and distributed system, edge computing integrates computing, networking, storage, and applications. It provides intelligent services on the edge of an IoT. The edge network is comprised of various wireless and wired networks, and the computing and storage resources of edge nodes are limited. These conditions make the edge network expose to a variety of cyber attacks. Additionally, it is difficult for an IoT edge node to support large-scale network data collection and detection for IoT security. Although big data-enabled intrusion detection algorithms can ensure the high accuracy of intrusion detection systems, it is stressful for resource-limited edge nodes to implement those algorithms in IoTs. Motivated by these challenges, we propose an intelligent intrusion detection algorithm implemented by big data mining based on fuzzy rough set, Generative Adversarial Network (GAN), and Convolutional Neural Network (CNN). In our method, we first propose a fuzzy rough set-based algorithm to perform feature selection for big data via IoTs. Then, we take advantage of the efficient feature extraction capabilities of CNN for implementing intrusion detection based on selected features. Furthermore, after combining CNN and GAN, we propose an intelligent algorithm to realize intrusion detection in a variety of scenarios. Finally, the proposed method is compared with existing methods for evaluation. Simulation results show that our method has up to 4% higher accuracy than existing methods.

Edge computing (EC) offers cloud-like services at the edge of mobile networks to satisfy the delay-sensitive and rapid computation applications in meeting the demands of rapidly increasing mobile devices and other IoTs. EC is known to be constrained with limited resources that its efficacy greatly depends on an effective and efficient resource allocation to provide optimal resources utilization. Focusing on the fact, this paper presents an adaptive resource allocation mechanism, abbreviated as A-PBRA, for effective resources utilization in the EC paradigm. To realize optimal utilization, the available resources are allocated dynamically (adaptability) by considering the nature of the incoming requests. The proposed scheme shall adapt to the resource demands and priorities of the incoming requests. After identifying the received request which can be either priority-based or normal request, each of them is processed with three possibilities. The available resources are thus allocated as per the priorities of the incoming requests to satisfy the constraints accordingly. The proposed mechanism is adaptable to a maximum number of incoming requests along with optimizing the utilization of limited resources at the edge node. Extensive simulations were performed through ifogsim to evaluate the performance of the proposed method. Critical comparisons were made against closely related algorithms and techniques i.e., the NBIHA and the CORA-GT. The simulation results from the proposed scheme optimistically showing that it performed better in terms of resources utilization, average response time, task execution time, and energy consumption.

Edge computing has been recently introduced as a way to bring computational capabilities closer to end users of modern network-based services, in order to support existent and future delay-sensitive applications by effectively addressing the high propagation delay issue that affects cloud computing. However, the problem of efficiently and fairly manage the system resources presents particular challenges due to the limited capacity of both edge nodes and wireless access networks, as well as the heterogeneity of resources and services' requirements. To this end, we propose a techno-economic market where service providers act as buyers, securing both radio and computing resources for the execution of their associated end users' jobs, while being constrained by a budget limit. We design an allocation mechanism that employs convex programming in order to find the unique market equilibrium point that maximizes fairness, while making sure that all buyers receive their preferred resource bundle. Additionally, we derive theoretical properties that confirm how the market equilibrium approach strikes a balance between fairness and efficiency. We also propose alternative allocation mechanisms and give a comparison with the market-based mechanism. Finally, we conduct simulations in order to numerically analyze and compare the performance of the mechanisms and confirm the theoretical properties of the market model., Comment: Corrected typos and figure orientation. in IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing

The 5G network presents a new horizon with tremendous opportunities for future generation wireless networks. Mobile edge computing (MEC), non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA), and network slicing (NS) are some of the key enablers for 5G. MEC reduces the latency to a great extent for a wireless network, while NOMA gives access to more users with resource constraints. NS provides users with a better quality of service and network operators with more flexibility. In this work, we propose an NS technique enabled with NOMA for a MEC network. The proposed NS technique improves service latency for MEC users and reduces the unnecessary allocation of radio resources in NOMA. The saved resources can be leveraged to accommodate more users, thus increasing the spectral efficiency of the network. We consider different types of services based on the task completion time of users in this work. The primary focus is to optimize the total energy consumption for wireless uplink transmission for the NOMA-enabled sliced MEC network. We also propose a heuristic algorithm as an alternative to reduce the time and computational complexities of the optimization algorithm and simulate the results extensively to show the effectiveness of our proposed algorithm.

The proliferation of Internet of Things (IoT) data and innovative mobile services has promoted an increasing need for low-latency access to resources such as data and computing services. Mobile edge computing has become an effective computing paradigm to meet the requirement for low-latency access by placing resources and dispatching tasks at the edge clouds near mobile users. The key challenge of such solution is how to efficiently place resources and dispatch tasks in the edge clouds to meet the QoS of mobile users or maximize the platform's utility. In this paper, we study the joint optimization problem of resource placement and task dispatching in mobile edge clouds across multiple timescales under the dynamic status of edge servers. We first propose a two-stage iterative algorithm to solve the joint optimization problem in different timescales, which can handle the varieties among the dynamic of edge resources and/or tasks. We then propose a reinforcement learning (RL) based algorithm which leverages the learning capability of Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient (DDPG) technique to tackle the network variation and dynamic as well. The results from our trace-driven simulations demonstrate that both proposed approaches can effectively place resources and dispatching tasks across two timescales to maximize the total utility of all scheduled tasks.

With the development of MEC services, MEC brokers will emerge to facilitate the purchase and management of resources for individual MEC users. Both data communication and computing resources offered by MEC service providers can be purchased by pay-as-you-go (PAYG) or reserved plans. Besides data and computing plans for each type of resource, we also consider combo plans specifically designed for MEC services covering both resources. In this paper, we propose a smart online aggregated reservation (SOAR) framework for MEC brokers to minimize their cost of reserving resources for multiple users without the knowledge of future demands. In our framework, a task aggregation algorithm is designed to aggregate the users' demands in each PAYG billing cycle to improve the plan utilization, and plan reservation algorithms are proposed to decide when to reserve which plans. The performance gap (competitive ratio) between SOAR and optimal solution which knows all future demands in advance, is analyzed and derived in closed-form. The performance gap is proved to be the minimum among all deterministic online algorithms. Trace-driven simulations verify the cost advantage of our SOAR framework, which can save nearly 40% of cost for users through the brokerage service.

Edge computing provides computing capability at close-user proximity to reduce service latency for end users. To improve the efficiency of edge computing infrastructures, geographically-distributed edge datacenters can co-work with each other and with cloud datacenters, forming a new paradigm referred to as cooperative edge-cloud computing. In this context, applications typically run on a virtual machine (VM) that can be replicated at multiple sites, and thus user traffic can be served at all the sites where corresponding VMs reside. For the performance of many applications, latency is a critical parameter. In this work, taking applications latencies as the primary constraint, we model the problem of VM placement and workload assignment as a mixed integer linear program and develop heuristic algorithms accordingly. The goal is to minimize the consumption of information technology (IT) infrastructures for placing VMs in cooperative edge-cloud computing, while meeting the heterogeneous latency demands of different applications. Some preliminary results indicate that edge datacenters resource efficiency can be optimized by proper cross-site VM placement and workload re-direction.

International audience; Internet of Things (IoT) applications often require the processing of data streams generated by devices dispersed over a large geographical area. Traditionally, these data streams are forwarded to a distant cloud for processing, thus resulting in high application end-to-end latency. Recent work explores the combination of resources located in clouds and at the edges of the Internet, called cloud-edge infrastructure, for deploying Data Stream Processing (DSP) applications. Most previous work, however, fails to scale to very large IoT settings. This paper introduces deployment strategies for the placement of DSP applications on to cloud-edge infrastructure. The strategies split an application graph into regions and consider regions with stringent time requirements for edge placement. The proposed Aggregate End-to-End Latency Strategy with Region Patterns and Latency Awareness (AELS+RP+LA) decreases the number of evaluated resources when computing an operator’s placement by considering the communication overhead across computing resources. Simulation results show that, unlike the state-of-the-art, AELS+RP+LA scales to environments with more than 100k resources with negligible impact on the application end-to-end latency.

Mobile edge computing (MEC), extending computing services from cloud to edge, is recognized as one of key pillars to facilitate real-time services and tackle backhaul bottleneck. However, it is not economically efficient to attach intensive security appliances to every MEC node to defend application-level DDoS attacks and ensure the availability of services. Thus, we explore the elasticity of security defense among MEC nodes by proposing a COoperative DEfense (CODE) framework for MEC, referred to as CODE4MEC. CODE4MEC aims to adapt to traffic changes by coordinating container-carried defensive resources among cooperative MEC nodes in an automatic way. Towards this aim, we propose four control plane functions to enable a life-cycle management for CODE4MEC, namely, CODE triggering, scheduling, coordination and releasing. However, an effective CODE4MEC requires non-trivial algorithmic schemes, in particular for CODE scheduling and coordination functions. We thus design an online combinatorial auction mechanism for real-time CODE scheduling, and prove a tighter performance bound relative to prior arts. As for CODE coordination, a flow-based traffic and context information coordination scheme is proposed to enable classical defense schemes to work properly and efficiently. Finally, using a combination of real testbed and simulation evaluations, we validate the effectiveness of CODE4MEC.

Due to the excessive concentration of computing resources in the traditional centralized cloud service system, there will be three prominent problems of management confusion, construction cost and network delay. Therefore, we propose to virtualize regional edge computing resources in intelligent buildings as edge service pooling, then presents a hierarchical cloud platform with dual-service pooling structure and a dynamic strategy for the proposed model. The analytic hierarchy process (AHP) based quality of service (QoS) evaluation mechanism and the dynamic normal distribution selection method are adopted for service deployment. And the dynamic inertia particle swarm optimization (DI-PSO) algorithm is employed to realize task scheduling. Furthermore, the cloud platform and existing terminal server group are used to conduct platform structure comparison experiments, and the popular task scheduling algorithms are selected for simulation experiments. Experimental results of platform measurement show that the average service response time of different services can be improved by about 17.3% to 37.4%. The average occupancy ratio of computing resources can be reduced by about 5%. The simulation results show that the earliest completion time of single task list can be decreased by 11.3% to 20.9%, and the makespan of 100 task lists can be improved by 0.3 times.

Mobile edge computing is a new paradigm in which the computing and storage resources are placed at the edge of the Internet. Data placement and retrieval are fundamental services of mobile edge computing when a network of edge clouds collaboratively provide data services. However existing methods such as distributed hash tables (DHTs) are not enough to achieve efficient data placement and retrieval services for cooperative edge clouds. This paper presents GRED, a novel data placement and retrieval service for mobile edge computing, which is efficient in not only the load balance but also routing path lengths and forwarding table sizes. GRED utilizes the programmable switches to support a virtual-space based DHT with only one overlay hop. Data location can be easily implemented on top of the GRED. We implement GRED in a P4 prototype, which provides a simple and efficient solution. Results from theoretical analysis, simulations, and experiments show that GRED can efficiently balance the load of edge clouds, and can fast answer data queries due to its low routing stretch.

In recent years, edge computing has become an increasingly popular computing paradigm to enable real-time data processing and mobile intelligence. Edge computing allows computing at the edge of the network, where data is generated and distributed at the nearby edge servers to reduce the data access latency and improve data processing efficiency. One of the key challenges in data-intensive edge computing is how to place the data at the edge clouds effectively such that the access latency to the data is minimized. In this paper, we study such a data placement problem in edge computing while different data items have diverse popularity. We propose a popularity based placement method which maps both data items and edge servers to a virtual plane and places or retrieves data based on its virtual coordinate in the plane. We then further propose additional placement strategies to handle load balancing among edge servers via either offloading or data duplication. Simulation results show that our proposed strategies efficiently reduce the average path length of data access and the load-balancing strategies indeed provide an effective relief of storage pressures at certain overloaded servers.

Generally the accelerators type identifies the edge computing performance hugely and it includes Integrated Circuit (IC), Graphical Processing Unit (GPU) and Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA). Among these accelerator FPGAs are widely used in several edge computing areas since it has the ability to reconfigure and has high energy efficient. The consequence also comes out with the paradigm of scheduling efficiency on CPU’s (software tasks) and FPGA (hardware tasks). However the conventional schemes not entirely exploited the variations among hardware and software tasks which results in low scheduling efficiency. Therefore a task scheduling system is proposed on basis of fully active reconfigurable system. The scheduling efficiency for the proposed scheme can be increased by switching the task overheads and by predicting the execution time for hardware with minimum task switching times.

It is widely acknowledged that the success of deep learning is built on large-scale training data and tremendous computing power. However, the data and computing power are not always available for many real-world applications. In this paper, we address the machine learning problem where it lacks training data and limits computing power. Specifically, we investigate domain adaptation which is able to transfer knowledge from one labeled source domain to an unlabeled target domain, so that we do not need much training data from the target domain. At the same time, we consider the situation that the running environment is confined, e.g., in edge computing the end device has very limited running resources. Technically, we present the Faster Domain Adaptation (FDA) protocol and further report two paradigms of FDA: early stopping and amid skipping. The former accelerates domain adaptation by multiple early exit points. The latter speeds up the adaptation by wisely skip several amid neural network blocks. Extensive experiments on standard benchmarks verify that our method is able to achieve the comparable and even better accuracy but employ much less computing resources. To the best of our knowledge, there are very few works which investigated accelerating knowledge adaptation in the community.

In this paper, we study a novel service reliability augmentation problem in an Edge Computing network, where mobile users request network services with a service function chain (SFC) and reliability expectation requirements. To enhance the service reliability of user requests, it is a common practice to make use of redundant network function (VNF) instance placement in case their primary VNF instances fail. To this end, we first formulate a novel service reliability augmentation problem for each admitted request and show the NP-hardness of the problem. We then provide an admission framework of user requests by placing primary VNF instances of network functions in the SFC to different cloudlets, and then develop a randomized algorithm with a good approximation ratio and high probability for the service reliability augmentation problem, at the expense of moderate resource constraint violations. We also devise a deterministic heuristic for the problem without any resource violation. We thirdly extend the proposed algorithm for a single request to the service reliability augmentation problem for a set of requests. We finally evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithms through experimental simulations. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed algorithms are promising and superior to their analytical counterparts.

Research on Mobile Cyber Physical Systems (MCPS) that have the superiorities of Cyber Physical Systems (CPS) and expand their application range has become a trend in recent years. The applications of MCPS in fields such as intelligent transportation systems, smart home appliances and mobile education have also become increasingly mature. However, MCPS also has some shortcomings that need to be solved urgently. Sensors carried on mobile devices collect data and upload huge amounts of data to the cloud for statistics and analysis. Mobile devices need to directly interact with the cloud, causing both parties bear huge computing and communication costs. Since the interaction process includes data sharing and storage, it is particularly important to protect the data itself and the security of sharing. Searchable encryption ensures the safety of communication among the MPEs and the cloud, while protecting the privacy of data on the cloud. However, the existing searchable encryption technology cannot provide efficient and reliable data storage and sharing services for MPEs in MCPS under the premise of ensuring security. In this article, we present a secure and efficient data sharing and privacy protection scheme in MCPS on the basis of the edge computing model (NESPS). Meanwhile, the introduction of edge computing (EC) significantly reduces the communication consumption between the device and the cloud. Furthermore, attribute-based encryption ABE) enable the NESPS to achieve fine-grained management of device authorities. Moreover, we have carried out security analysis and simulation on the NESPS, the results demonstrate that the NESPS meets the proposed requirements.

Current edge computing systems are deployed in highly complex application scenarios with dynamically changing requirements. In order to provide the expected performance and energy efficiency values in these situations, the use of heterogeneous hardware/software platforms at the edge has become widespread. However, these computing platforms still suffer from the lack of unified software-driven programming models to efficiently deploy multi-purpose hardware-accelerated solutions. In parallel, edge computing systems also face another huge challenge: operating under multiple conditions that were not taken into account during any of the design stages. Moreover, these conditions may change over time, forcing self-adaptation mechanisms to become a must. This paper presents an integrated architecture to exploit hardware-accelerated data-parallel models and transparent hardware/software multithreading. In particular, the proposed architecture leverages the \ARTICo framework and ReconOS to allow developers to select the most suitable programming model to deploy their edge computing applications onto run-time reconfigurable hardware devices. An evolvable hardware system is used as an additional architectural component during validation, providing support for continuous lifelong learning in smart edge computing scenarios. In particular, the proposed setup exhibits online learning capabilities that include learning by imitation from software-based reference algorithms.

More and more artificial intelligence (AI) applications, such as virtual reality (VR) and video analytics, is rapidly progressing towards enterprise and end users with the promise of bringing immersive experience. Such AI applications need unprecedented requirements for ultra-low latency. Edge computing is emerged to guarantee the timeliness for the delay-sensitive applications. The delay experienced by AI users can be significantly reduced, by caching various services that are initially deployed at data centers to cloudlets in edge networks. However, it is impractical to cache all services to cloudlets, due to often limited operational budget of service providers and resource capacity constraints of edge cloudlets. In this paper, we investigate a fundamental problem of service caching from remote data centers to cloudlets in a multi-tiered edge cloud network. We first develop two approximation algorithms with approximation ratios to solve the problem for a single type of service demanded by users. We then devise an efficient heuristic to solve the problem that users request different types of services. We finally conduct extensive experiments on a real testbed to evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithms, and experimental results demonstrate that our algorithms can outperform some existing algorithms significantly with 25% lower average delay.

Ranked keyword search has gained increasing attention due to its attractive advantages such as flexibility and accessibility. However, most existing ranked keyword search schemes ignore the semantic associations between the documents and queries. To solve this challenging issue in cloud-assisted edge computing, we first design the Semantic-aware Ranked Multi-keyword \textbf{S}earch (SRMS) scheme by adopting the Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) topic model and the Chinese Remainder Theorem (CRT)-based secret sharing mechanism. Considering that the cloud server may be malicious, we implement a basic verification mechanism in SRMS to verify the correctness and completeness of search results and extend this verification mechanism in cloud-assisted edge computing scenarios. Formal security analysis proves that SRMS and extended result verification mechanisms are secure in both the known ciphertext model and the known background model. Extensive experiments using the real-world dataset demonstrate that SRMS is efficient and feasible in practical applications.

Edge computing, as a new computing paradigm that extends cloud computing, allows a service vendor to deploy its services on distributed edge servers to serve its service users in close geographic proximity to those edge servers. Caching edge data on edge servers can minimize service users data retrieval latency. However, such edge data are subject to intentional and accidental corruption in the highly distributed and dynamic edge computing environment. Verifying the integrity of service vendors edge data accurately and efficiently is a critical security problem. Given a potentially large number of edge servers and their limited computing capacities, verifying the integrity of the edge data on each edge server individually is computation expensive. In this paper, we make the first attempt to tackle this Edge Data Integrity (EDI) problem from the service vendors perspective by proposing an inspection and corruption localization scheme for EDI named ICL-EDI. This scheme allows a service vendor to inspect its edge data and localize corrupted edge data on multiple edge servers accurately and efficiently. To evaluate its performance, we implement ICL-EDI and conduct extensive experiments to demonstrate its effectiveness and efficiency.

Pseudo-inverse learners (PILs) are a kind of feedforward neural network trained with the pseudoinverse learning algorithm, which can be traced back to 1995 originally. PIL is an approach for nongradient descent learning, and its main advantage is the lower computational cost and fast learning procedure, which is especially relevant in the edge computing research field. However, PIL is mostly applied to a deterministic learning problem, while in the real world, the greatest case that is of concern is the uncertainty learning problem. In this work, under the framework of the synergetic learning system (SLS), we introduce an approximated synergetic learning scheme, which can transform uncertainty learning into deterministic learning. We call this new learning framework the Bayesian PIL, and the advantages are also demonstrated in this work.

Cyber-physical-social systems (CPSS) as an emerging computing paradigm are revolutionizing the relationship between humans, devices and physical environments and will be expected to have a fundamental impact and influence in our daily lives. In a typical CPSS scenario, plenty of nodes (or devices) often adopt wireless distributed contention protocols to transmit sensed environment states for decision making. Therefore, designing a high-efficient and collision-less contention protocol is of great importance for wireless networking. As is known, in the classic time-to-frequency (T2F) protocol, each node signals on one randomly chosen subcarrier for contention. Though reducing the conventional time-domain contention time, T2F leads to many contention collisions (i.e., multiple nodes choose the same subcarrier) when the number of nodes is large. Aiming at this challenge, in this paper, we propose M-T2F (where each node signals on multiple randomly chosen subcarriers for contention) and analyze its consensus achievement. Specifically, M-T2F supports more nodes for transmission but introduces less collision, benefiting from lots of multicarrier choice combinations. Since the subset relationship between subcarrier choices poses a challenge to reach a consensus among nodes, M-T2F enables all nodes to reach a consensus by excluding the subset relationship and reduces contention time by utilizing wireless broadcast characteristic

Mobile edge computing (MEC) has emerged as a promising technology that offers resource-intensive yet delay-sensitive applications from the edge of mobile networks. With the emergence of complicated and resource-hungry mobile applications, offloading user tasks to cloudlets of nearby mobile edge-cloud networks is becoming an important approach to leverage the processing capability of mobile devices, reduce mobile device energy consumptions, and improve experiences of mobile users. In this paper we first study the provisioning of virtualized network function (VNF) services for user requests in an MEC network, where each user request has a demanded data packet rate with a specified network function service requirement, and different user requests need different services that are represented by virtualized network functions instantiated in cloudlets. We aim to maximize the number of user request admissions while minimizing their admission cost, where the request admission cost consists of the computing cost on instantiations of requested VNF instances and the data packet traffic processing of requests in their VNF instances, and the communication cost of routing data packet traffic of requests between users and the cloudlets hosting their requested VNF instances. We study the joint VNF instance deployment and user requests assignment in MEC, by explicitly exploring a non-trivial usage tradeoff between different types of resources. To this end, we first formulate the cost minimization problem that admits all requests by assuming that there is sufficient computing resource in MEC to accommodate the requested VNF instances of all requests, for which we formulate an Integer Linear Programming solution and two efficient heuristic algorithms. We then deal with the problem under the computing resource constraint. We term this problem as the throughput maximization problem by admitting as many as requests, subject to computing resource capacity on each cloudlet, for which we formulate an ILP solution when the problem size is small; otherwise, we devise efficient algorithms for it. We finally evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithms through experimental simulations. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed algorithms are promising. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to explicitly explore the usage tradeoff between computing and communication resources in the admissions of user requests in MEC through introducing a novel load factor concept to minimize the request admission cost and maximize the network throughput.

In the edge computing environment, app vendors can cache their data on a large number of geographically distributed edge servers to serve their users. However, those cached data are particularly vulnerable to both intentional and accidental corruption, which makes data security a major concern in the EC environment. Given limited computing resources of edge servers, how to effectively and efficiently inspect those data over tremendous edge servers is a critical and open problem. To tackle this edge data integrity (EDI) problem, we first study the entities, threats, system objectives, and the inspection mechanism, then propose a novel approach named EDI-S for inspecting the integrity of edge data and localizing the corrupted ones. Based on the elliptic curve, EDI-S generates one digital signature as the integrity proof for each replica. Then, multiple integrity proofs are aggregated to be inspected together. This mechanism allows the integrity of tremendous cache data on multiple edge servers can be inspected altogether via an aggregate verification. EDI-S also provides two methods for localizing the corrupted data on edge servers, one for small-scale scenarios and the other for large-scale scenarios. Both theoretical analysis and experimentally evaluation demonstrate that EDI-S can solve the EDI problem effectively and efficiently.

Mobile edge computing (MEC) can significantly reduce latency by pushing resources away from remote clouds to distributed base stations (BSs) equipped with MEC servers, which are closer to users and deployed by service providers (SPs) at the edge of cellular networks. To improve user experience and increase their own revenue, SPs tend to use resources in their deployed BSs to provide services instead of using resources in BSs deployed by other SPs. We envision a densely-deployed multi-SP MEC network where a user equipment (UE) is covered by multiple BSs from different SPs. As the resource in BSs and MEC servers is limited, it is a challenging problem for SPs to reasonably allocate resources in the edge computing (EC) layer to improve the quality of service. In this paper, we propose a novel resource allocation scheme, Decentralized Multi-SP Resource Allocation (DMRA), which aims to maximize the total profit of all SPs at the EC layer and provide high-quality services. Then, we extend our design to the online scheme. The algorithm Decentralized Multi-SP Online Resource Allocation (DMORA) is proposed to fit the dynamic network environment. Simulation results indicate that our proposed schemes can effectively maximize the total profit of all SPs at the EC layer while improving user experience.

Differential privacy (DP) has gained popularity in truth discovery recently due to its strong privacy guarantee. However, existing DP mechanisms for streaming data publication are not suitable for truth discovery as they fail to consider the different reliabilities of individuals, while the DP-based approaches for truth discovery are not suitable for streaming data because they ignore the correlations between truths over time. To solve this problem, we propose an edge computing based privacy-preserving truth discovery mechanism, PrivSTD, for streaming crowdsourced data to realize high accuracy of discovered truth while protecting the privacy of workers. Specifically, edge servers are introduced between the untrusted cloud server and workers to securely calculate the local truths and workers reliabilities. A truth-dependent budget recycle mechanism is designed for each edge server to adaptively determine the perturbed timestamp and allocate the privacy budget according to the changing pattern of local truths. Besides, a reliability-based perturbation mechanism is proposed to reduce the perturbation magnitude based on worker's reliability. We theoretical analyze the data utility and computation cost of PrivSTD, and prove that PrivSTD can satisfy w-event (,)-differential privacy. Extensive experimental results on synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that PrivSTD achieves better utility than the state-of-the-art approaches.

In recent years, containers have gained popularity as a lightweight virtualization technology. This rise in popularity has gone hand in hand with the adoption of microservice architectures, mostly thanks to the scalable, ethereal, and isolated nature of containers. More recently, edge devices have become powerful enough to be able to run containerized microservices, while remaining flexible enough in terms of size and power to be deployed almost anywhere. This has triggered research into several container placement strategies involving edge networks, leading to concepts such as osmotic computing. While these container placement strategies are optimal in terms of workload placement, current container orchestrators are often not suitable for running on edge devices due to their high resource requirements. In this article, FLEDGE is presented as a Kubernetes-compatible container orchestrator based on Virtual Kubelets, aimed primarily at container orchestration on low-resource edge devices. Several aspects of low-resource container orchestration are examined, such as the choice of container runtime and how to realize container networking. A number of evaluations are performed to determine how FLEDGE compares to Kubernetes and K3S in terms of resource requirements, showing that it needs around 60MiB memory and 78MiB storage to run on a Raspberry Pi 3, including all dependencies, which is significantly less than both studied alternatives.

The rapid advancement of cloud computing has promoted the development of cloud storage services. One of the biggest concerns of cloud users is whether the completeness and recoverability of data can be guaranteed when cloud servers encounter problems. Only when the integrity of data is fully guaranteed can users consume cloud storage with confidence, especially in a complicated cloud environment with multiple clouds. However, the literature still lacks a thorough survey on cloud data integrity auditing for both single copy and multiple replicas. In this article, we survey and compare existing auditing schemes for single copy and multiple replicas based on a set of criteria. Based on our review and analysis, we discuss open issues, potential applications and future directions in the field of the integrity auditing in the cloud, including the implications of such trendy topics as merging blockchain and edge computing into data integrity auditing.

The Agriculture 4.0, also called Smart Agriculture or Smart Farming, is at the origin of the production of a huge amount of data that must be collected, stored, and processed in a very short time. Processing this massive quantity of data needs to use specific infrastructure that use adapted IoT architectures. Our review offers a comparative panorama of Central Cloud, Distributed Cloud Architectures, Collaborative Computing Strategies, and new trends used in the context of Agriculture 4.0. In this review, we try to answer 4 research questions: (1) Which storage and processing architectures are best suited to Agriculture 4.0 applications and respond to its peculiarities? (2) Can generic architectures meet the needs of Agriculture 4.0 application cases? (3) What are the horizontal development possibilities that allow the transition from research to industrialization? (4) What are the vertical valuations possibilities to move from algorithms trained in the cloud to embedded or stand-alone products? For this, we compare architectures with 8 criteria (User Proximity, Latency & Jitter, Network stability, high throughput, Reliability, Scalability, Cost Effectiveness, Maintainability), and analyze the advantages and disadvantages of each of them.

In recent years, edge computing has attracted significant attention because it can effectively support many delay-sensitive applications. Despite such a salient feature, edge computing also faces many challenges, especially for efficiency and security, because edge devices are usually heterogeneous and may be untrustworthy. To address these challenges, we propose a unified framework to provide efficiency and confidentiality by coded distributed computing. Within the proposed framework, we use matrix multiplication, a fundamental building block of many distributed machine learning algorithms, as the representative computation task. To minimize resource consumption while achieving information-theoretic security, we investigate two highly-coupled problems, (1) task allocation that assigns data blocks in a computing task to edge devices, and (2) linear code design that generates data blocks by encoding the original data with random information. Specifically, we first theoretically analyze the necessary conditions for the optimal solution. Based on the theoretical analysis, we develop an efficient task allocation algorithm. Using the task allocation, we then design secure coded computing schemes, for two cases, (1) with redundant computation and (2) without redundant computation. Moreover, we also theoretically analyze the optimization of the proposed scheme. Finally, we conduct extensive simulation experiments to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed schemes.

The edge computing paradigm, spurred by the Internet-of-Things, poses new requirements and challenges for distributed application deployment. There is a need for an orchestrator design that leverages characteristics that enable this new paradigm. We present HYDRA, a decentralized and distributed orchestrator for containerized microservice applications. This orchestrator focuses on scalability and resiliency to enable the global manageability of cloud and edge environments. It can manage heterogeneous resources across geographical locations and provide robust application control. Further, HYDRA enables the location-aware deployment of microservice applications via containerization. Thus, an application's services may be deployed to separate locations according to expected needs. In this paper, the experiments show the orchestrator scaling to 20 000 nodes and simultaneously deploying 30 000 applications. Further, empirical results show that location-aware application deployment does not hinder HYDRA's performance, and the random resource search algorithm currently being employed may be used as a baseline to find resources in this decentralized orchestrator. Therefore, we conclude that HYDRA is a viable orchestrator design for the new computing paradigm.

Aftershocks monitoring system is a large-scale Internet of Things (IoT) system. Earthquake signal detection and phase-picking, as the core of aftershocks monitoring system, is time-sensitive. Generally, the data generated by seismic stations are transmitted to the cloud for integration, storage, and processing through the network, contributing to network congestion and affecting the real time of earthquake warning as well as the supported applications. Edge computing, a new paradigm for real-time IoT tasks, has emerged as a trend to address concerns of response time, requirement, saving bandwidth costs, as well as data safety and privacy. Therefore, a neglected problem was tackled in this article. First, to meet the real-time requirement, we proposed a novel lightweight deep learning model called lightweight context-aware attention networks for earthquake signal detection and phase-picking. We optimized the deep learning model and reduced the computation requirements to deal with edge devices that have lower computation power than cloud servers. Second, we deployed the model to the Jetson Nano, a small edge device, to offload computation tasks from cloud servers to edge devices. In this way, seismic stations do not need to send raw data to a centralized server. Third, experiments show that our method is robust and easily generalized to other databases. The entire model is only 3.7 MB and achieves the accuracy-latency trade-off.

Vehicular crowdsourcing is a promising paradigm that takes advantage of powerful onboard capabilities of vehicles to perform various tasks in smart cities. To fulfill this vision, a well-designed incentive mechanism is essential to stimulate the participation of vehicles. In this paper, we propose a timeliness-aware incentive mechanism for vehicular crowdsourcing by taking vehicle's uncertain travel time into account. In view of the stochastic nature of traffic conditions, we derive a tractable expression for the probability distribution of task delay based on a discrete-time traffic model. By leveraging reverse auction framework, we model the utility of a service requester as a function in terms of uncertain task delay and incurred payment. To maximize the requester's utility under a budget constraint, we cast the mechanism design as a non-monotone submodular maximization problem over a knapsack constraint. Based on this formulation, we develop a truthful budgeted utility maximization auction (TBUMA), which is truthful, budget feasible, profitable, individually rational and computationally efficient. Through extensive trace-based simulations, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed incentive mechanism.

In-situ tool condition monitoring (In-situ TCM) is vital for metal removal manufacturing which realizes on-machine diagnosis in a real-time manner. The limitation of in-situ TCM based on traditional deep learning lies in several aspects: the requirement of sufficient labeled data of health conditions, the empirically manual designed architecture and the labor-intensive tuning of hyper-parameters. Network-based deep transfer learning (NDTL) partially solves the problem of limited labeled data. However, the time-consuming architecture design and the tuning of hyper-parameters also pose a great impact on the schedule of real in-situ TCM projects. In this paper, a new NDTL method is proposed, which is automatically designed by the genetic algorithm (NDTL-GA). A degradation monitoring experiment is conducted employing edge computing devices under multiple working conditions, where the texture of the machined surface is collected during the whole life cycle of milling cutters. The experimental results suggest that the proposed method possesses competitive performance evaluated by both the robustness metrics (e.g., the area under the curve of precision-recall (AUC-PR)) and the efficiency metrics (e.g., multiplyaccumulates (MACC)), where the trial-and-errors are reduced significantly by the automatic architecture design and the selection of hyper-parameters.

Edge computing has emerged as a promising paradigm for powering a huge number of applications requiring low latency, e.g., real-time navigation, interactive gaming, virtual or augmented reality, etc. Edge computing offers highly accessible computing and storage resources, including CPU, storage and bandwidth, by deploying edge servers at base stations. With more users accessing edge apps, a huge number of data will be transmitted via edge servers between users’ devices and remote cloud servers. A service provider can cache its app data on edge servers to ensure the low data retrieval latency of its users. Due to the physical size limits of edge servers, the optimal data caching strategy must minimize overall user latency with consideration of constrained cache spaces on edge servers. From the service provider’s perspective, we formulate this Constrained Edge Data Caching (CEDC) problem and prove the NP-hardness of this CEDC problem. After that, we propose CEDC-IP, an optimal approach solved by the Integer Programming technique, to find optimal solutions to this CEDC problem. We also propose CEDC-A, an approximation algorithm with theoretical guarantee, to find approximate solutions to large-scale CEDC problems efficiently. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments on a widely-used real-world data set, and the experimental results demonstrate that both CEDC-IP and CEDC-A significantly outperform the other four representative approaches.

Edge computing is a paradigm that extends cloud computing with storage and processing capacity close to the edge of the network that can be materialized by using many fog nodes placed in multiple geographic locations. Fog nodes are likely to be vulnerable to tampering, so it is important to secure the functions they provide. A key building block of many distributed applications is an ordering service that keeps track of cause-effect dependencies among events and that allows events to be processed in an order that respects causality. In this paper we present the design and implementation of a secure event ordering service for fog nodes. Our service, named Omegae, leverages the availability of a Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) based on Intel SGX technology to offer fog clients guarantees regarding the order in which events are applied and served, even when fog nodes are compromised. We have also built OmegaKV, a key-value store that uses Omega e to offer causal consistency. Experimental results show that the ordering service can be secured without violating the latency constraints of time-sensitive edge applications, despite the overhead associated with using a TEE.